DOSE:

2 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 6x)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

Last night I had a wonderfully therapeutic experience with the Divine Sage. I have tried Salvia in the past (about 5 or 6 months ago), but did not like the experience. After last night, I now realize that the reason I did not like Salvia in the past is because I did not respect it.

Here is what I did: After having obtained 6X non-standardized extract, I decided to give it another try, but with good mental preparation before-hand. I drove about an hour to my favorite local campground (very secluded) and set up camp. I was by myself. After I was settled in and the fire was going, I sat down in front of the fire and began to play my didgeridoo. This instrument I have found is an excellent way to get in the right frame of mind for these types of experiences. After about half an hour of this, I decided it was time to try the Salvia. I smoked a small bowl.

When the feeling began to come on, I said to myself “Oh yeah, here we go again; now I remember what it feels like to be in this place. I can’t believe I came here again.” It made me feel somewhat afraid and depressed—as in self-condemnation. The feeling was especially laced with a sense of destiny, that life was eternal and that in eternity I was going to be miserable. (I know that sounds pretty heavy and I am curious as to whether other people are affected in a similar manner or if it is just my own psychology at work.) From my last experience, I knew this is what would happen to me under the influence of Salvia, but I wanted to try to work through the issues that I have in my normal, sober hours with depression. The way I see it, taking Salvia is like taking an acute dose of depression that lasts for about five to ten minutes. i have to mentally work my way through that depression, and when I wake up, I realize that I can take the things you just learned about yourself and life and apply them in my everyday, sober reality. And, after the first five or ten minutes, I noticed that the depression started to go away anyway and I could enjoy the hallucinations.

As to the hallucinations, the most prominent feature was the thought that there were other people around me. At the onset of the high, I became aware of the other people surrounding me (about three). But it wasn’t like they had just appeared and started up a conversation with me—it was like they had always been there and that I had been having a continuous discussion with them, of which I became aware only after using Salvia. I was sober enough to understand that they were just hallucinations—for a minute at least. I tried very hard to remain rational, starting to say to myself, “I just smoked Salvia, so these are hallucinations. They are not real.” But before I could even get to the end of that thought, I had already forgotten about it and was believing again that they were real.

So I just decided to go with it. It’s not like I could actually see the entities, they weren’t visual. It was just an awareness of their presence. At one point I was rational enough to be able to see that one of those entities was my own sober self—the guy that brought me to the campsite, made the fire, bought the Salvia, set up the tent, etc. I was standing beside myself.

After about 20 minutes I took another hit and had a more pleasant experience without the initial depressive episode. This time I sank back in my chair, feeling like I was being pulled down by an invisible force. I remember thinking that if I could just relax a little more, I would be able to leave my body and have an astral projection like I do sometimes at night while having lucid dreams. But I didn’t make it to that point. When I thought I was possibly beginning to float out of my body, I was startled back to consciousness by the realization that I had sunk to the point of almost falling out of my chair.

One other prominent feature of last night’s experience is that after the first hit of Salvia, while still under the influence (yet thinking I was back to soberness), I decided I wanted to go to sleep. It was only about 9:00 or 9:30, and before taking the hit I hadn’t planned on going to sleep right away, but I got up and started to head for the tent. But then I stopped midway and realized I was still high and that I really wasn’t ready for bed and went and sat back down next to the fire. A couple minutes later I got the urge to go walking around in the forest on one of those solitary nighttime walks (one of my favorite pastimes), but then I realized that this too wasn’t what I had planned.

Then I remembered what I had planned: to try to keep myself in a trance-like state after the effects of the Salvia wore off by playing the didgeridoo, letting the binaural beats created by the intersecting sound waves preserve my altered mental state by inducing the frequency following response, and concentrating on meditative mindfulness. This is what I had planned before I had come on my camping trip. So I sat there in front of the campfire and played my didgie for about an hour. It was great! Instead of going from my normal sober state of mind to the altered stated induced by didgeridoo-playing and meditating, I got to the same place a different route: from the Salvia high to the didgie trance. By the time I was in the didgie trance, I was in the best, most optimistic and happy state of mind. After that, I peacefully went to sleep and froze my ass off.

Afterthought: Based on my experience with the other entities and recognizing at least one of them as myself, I am led to wonder whether the “mind” is a collection of different consciousnesses located at different parts of the brain—consciousness that, when connected and effectively communicating with each other, produce the ego or waking personality through an emergence phenomenon.

Maybe Salvia works by making it possible to temporarily separate those different consciousness that are usually working together. That would explain why people often end up walking around and bumping into things while on Salvia, while another part of them is still conscious and thinking, but unaware that they are walking around: One consciousness is doing the walking, while another consciousness is doing the thinking, and because of the Salvia, they are separated, whereas they are normally working in conjunction with each other. Maybe the consciousnesses are divided along the lines or our evolving brain, the lower primitive brain stem, the cortical area, etc. Hmm…I wonder if Freud arrived at the idea of the id, ego and superego by means of hallucinogens, because this sure sounds similar.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 31827
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 14, 2006	Views: 5,344
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Alone (16), Entities / Beings (37), General (1)