DOSE: T+ 2:00

1 hit

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

65 kg

I am an 18 year old male, living in New Zealand and still in high school. I can say that in the past several years, specifically since the age of 13, I've taken my fair share of psychoactives, including hallucinogens such as Psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, LSA (from Morning Glory seeds) and of course the incredible Salvia divinorum. Not to mention copious amounts of marijuana.

Since I've begun experimenting with various hallucinogens I have thought myself to be quite the psychonaut, as if I could handle any sort of consciousness-changing substance thrown at me. I had never had what you would call a 'bad trip' before; I had a few challenging experiences but I would always end up viewing them as life-changing in a positive way. I had had a total of 3 salvia trips before the one I'm about to delve into, and I must say they had been some of my most positive journeys yet. I had previously expanded to an omnipotent being and watched humankind run its course, and on another occasion I had become Mario and travelled the Mushroom Kingdom squashing Goombas. It became my hallucinogen of choice partly because of its legal status and ready availability, partly because of its relatively short duration but mainly because of its ability to take you somewhere completely different.

My most recent experience with salvia, however, had to be one of the most challenging, overwhelming and at times downright scary journeys I have ever undergone on any psychoactive. It has definitely shifted my perspective as to what reality may actually be made of and how the universe moves through it.

A sunny Saturday morning began as many others do, my bag stocked with bong, weed, snacks, PS3 controllers and 1 gram of some 25x strength Sally D. Upon arriving at friend's flat we began the usual ritual of 'smoke a bowl each, play zombies, eat chips until you run out', and so on. The marijuana was smoked at approximately 1:30 p.m. The three of us (and the fourth on his way) had been interested in how being stoned might change the salvia experience and decided to head out to the forest for our trip, once number 4 arrived. Turned out he took another hour, so by the time we were able to head out it had been nearly 2 hours since we had smoked the weed (that was fine with me, since I'm generally a purist when it comes to taking drugs; mixing them tends to blur the effects and I like to be able to explore just one at a time).

This was number 4's first trip with salvia (and he wasn't stoned), so we let him and one of the others have the first trip while my other friend and I stayed as sitters. Their trips lasted about 20 minutes and the reports were positive - they both had quiet trips exploring visual landscapes. This got the remaining two of us pretty chilled out with good vibes about our trip, and still a bit high.

I was feeling adventurous this time, so I loaded up a full bowl, lit up a whopping toke and held that hit for at least 15 seconds. I say 'at least' because by the time I exhaled my field of vision had taken a full 90 degree twist clockwise and I knew I was headed for something really, really intense.

The speed at which the total feelings of loss of control and separation from my body hit me was staggering. I realised that I was going somewhere that was going to completely change my life, a whole universal phase was going to shift. I began feeling very warm but there was no chance that my brain was going to connect to my body to tell it to take off my sweater.

My vision, which was an extremely skewed and distorted view of the forest clearing around me, was being contorted into angular, or geometric form. I became aware of voices, only not so much voices as pervasive knowledge entering my being from something higher, something above myself, something that was going to be what was next after I was done. And the knowledge that came to me during that time was that 'I' was about to be 'over'.

I'll put it into a different light. What I learned, and what I still to some extent believe now, is that I, you, we, everything, this universe and others, anything that currently exists or could theoretically exist right now, is part of something, and that something is a 'phase'. A phase of reality. I did not come up with this idea myself, it was brought to my knowledge by whatever it was that wanted to end our phase. I could not have ever dreamed of this sort of idea before because nothing within our phase has been endowed with the knowledge that a totally different type of 'phase', reality, anything could exist beyond or after our own.

And it was incredibly, totally, undeniably real. I was locked in a struggle to stop a wholesale shift to the next phase. I was on the boundary between two realities; our own was about to be condensed into blank lines on the edge of mere ideas in the next phase - all life obliterated, consciousness destroyed, matter sent into oblivion, all theoretical possibility of our phase completely erased from the annals of time. I could sense that there was something utterly powerful, stretching across all phases, something that facilitated phase shifts and was beyond all control. I cannot think of a better way to describe it. But it made me angry - I was not ready for my reality to be erased, and this anger (or some other indescribable emotion) allowed me to hold on a bit longer.

I think in doing this I was able to coerce the all-powerful, phase-shifting whatever-it-was to allow this phase to continue on. For now. I'm not sure if this has been done before, I'm not sure whether I was right in doing this, or if it was my place to resist the shift, and to be honest I do not fully know whether this is in fact a new phase or still the old one. There are many unanswered questions.

I very slowly came back to grips with what was around me. It took what seemed like a very, very long time to convince myself that my world, my reality was coming back to me, and that I was coming back to my body. I could use my eyes to see but what I could see was definitely not what I was used to. I eventually realised that I could still feel the effects of the marijuana on my mind and felt a deep longing to be back to a 'normal' state of consciousness (is that is what it can be called; I don't know).

At this point it occurred to me that I was fairly far from where I had initially started the trip and that my friends were around me, talking. Apparently trying to talk to me. The fact that I could recognise my surroundings came as a great relief - but that is not to say I felt normal. I tried explaining to my friends even the slightest bit of what I had gone through, but as often happens after salvia journeys, my attempt at speech came out as mere blurbles.

It seemed like another long time before I was starting to feel normal again, and it felt as if it had been an hour since I had taken that monster hit. It came as a shock to learn it had only been about 25 minutes; it was now just past 4:30 p.m. I knew from past experience with salvia that trips are usually short - but this time, time had had no real meaning and only afterwards did I feel that I had been away for quite a while.

My friend took a video of part of my trip. Although I had absolutely no awareness of my physical self during most of the trip, and no control over it, apparently I had been standing up for quite a while and approached each person at some point. I even put my hand inside one friend's beanie and tried to grab his ear.

Though I can now look back at that video and see myself, looking like some sort of zombie or robot, and laugh a bit at how it looked to other people, I know that what I experienced was something that allowed me to be aware of what reality actually may be. It may not always be what we are used to and there is nothing to say that phase shifts do not happen on a regular basis. After all, how would we really know? If one phase is completely contorted, compressed into a jagged blank line, forgotten and effectively erased, who or what could know of its existence in the next phase? And finally, what I came into contact with - the next phase - certainly seemed to be very different. But what real proof is there that one phase couldn't be nearly identical to others? Are we not now living in a new phase of reality with no memory of what previously existed?

Anyway, back to what actually inspired this journey: the mixture of marijuana and salvia. I don't think being slightly stoned really changed the salvia experience to any degree - the salvia took me away from myself and left my stoned body behind. I think the only major difference was that when I came back to my body, the stoned feeling returned and that just slowed the process of coming back to 'normal reality'.
I have a hard time describing this experience as 'good' or 'bad', or putting any sort of label on it. I think the best thing to say is that I see reality in a different light now.

Salvia may have taken me to a place where I could witness, or be a part of, or even prevent a phase shift. It's hard to say for sure. I'm just going to let the rest of that Diviner's Sage sit for a while and think hard before again harnessing its immense potential. I have great respect for salvia, not just as a drug but as a messenger to those who wish to know what's really going on.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 91103
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Jan 5, 2013	Views: 7,817
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Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), Combinations (3), Mystical Experiences (9), Nature / Outdoors (23), Small Group (2-9) (17)