DOSE:

1/4 g

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

124 lb

This was my first experience with Salvia. In fact, my first experience with any type of mind-altering substance other than Maryjane or the occasional Vicodin. I've always wanted to try something mind bending, but the right opportunity had just never arrived.

My wife went to bed. Her brother and I were in his room (we were staying at her family's place at the time), and we sat down on the couch. I kicked my feet up, paused my music, and he packed the pipe. Looking in the pipe, it was maybe a 1/4-1/3 gram's worth. I'm not sure other than that most the bag was still intact. He gave me the 'green' and I took the torch lighter up with the pipe and pulled. I'm used to being the weak one in the groups with green. I've always been a fan of small baby hits. But after reading about so many people's disenchanted and bunk experiences with Salvia not working, I decided to go for the ropes.

Pulling down to my gut like a Qigong breathing exercise, I inhaled and burned whatever I could. I felt my lungs fill up, but no desire to cough, just a lack of oxygen fooling my body at first in a quick jolt. I held it and handed it off. I watched my brother-in-law take the pipe from my hand. The rest is grey. He would later go on to tell me that he handed me the pipe back, and I reached for the play button on the computer to launch the album 'El Cielo' by Dredg. But as I released the hit, what I had always thought of as reality went with it.

Quickly my mind darted off to the realization that we are made up of particles. Mind you now, I am a martial artist and a Chinese philosophy and religious studies fanatic. No science or physics classes beyond biology, anatomy and Chinese alchemy ever crossed my brain. But the particles bent like they were droopy or elastic, with no spring back. Like the idea of melting plastic, but without the burns. As I pressed into the room of the trip (not the room of my body), it also began to fall to this rubber fate. As things landed, the whole world turned to pins and needs almost, as what I knew of as me molded into everything out around it.

Awkwardly, here is where the moment of supreme interconnectivity of consciousnesses might collide with the reality I was experiencing. Instead though, it was as if the world around me molded together into a giant ball of particles of some sort. But I knew then and there, nothing had changed. I was only changing my perspective of the world I had always known. I was becoming that single moment. And I died. The moment that was me, I stayed with as the moment passed, but moments only exist in one brief glimpse in our time and space. I became that glimpse. The world stopped existing. It was made up of particles, and fell into smaller particles. Realizing though, nothing was falling. I was only becoming less and less. I was finding the single particle that is 'me' in that one fleeting 'moment.' And everything was blank.

In the time of our experienced reality, this all may have been five minutes. But as far as I was concerned, and still am, I died there. The next moment though, I was born, and that's when the fear doubled. Rushing back towards reality, I had no clue who or what I am/was/are/willbe. I had no memories of words, places, people, physics, science, or experiences. I was completely void of any comprehension of sense or reality. I had to learn to see again. I had to learn to understand what the world was made of. I attacked the consciousness with outbursts of mumblings that my sitter said were language like, but not of a language he understood. Reality wasn't what I knew of it. I knew nothing of experience or existence, but something was being created. This was the processes of me coming 'back' to this reality.

As reality rebuilt, I didn't know my place in it. I ran to the door, said something in this Deep Speech, and ran down the stairs. Dylan-the-Sitter yelled down to me, asking where I was going. I mumbled again, and ran up the stairs. I started swift pacing around the couch in a circle for what had no time to me, but he said were as many as 200 laps. Quickly I turned towards a window. I realized I was going downstairs to escape this prison of a world. Not by death, just by moving my matter and particles through the others, hoping things would fall back to pieces and escape this forbidding prison of quarks.

I opened the window and my brother-by-marriage stopped me in fear of jumping. I yelled at him in this foreign tongue, and shoved my head and upper body out the window into the new experience of rain. Realizing and reconnecting to a world, I believe I began to accept these binds once again as I had for the past 25 years. But I realized then and there I had died. Returning to the couch, I begin speaking English. calling his name... 'Dylan... You're Dylan. You have a name... A name can be Dylan. You have hands. That's Dylan too...' was the recap he later explained to me.

Headphones: across the room.

Pipe: Across the room.

Chair-as-ottoman: across the room.

Laptop: Shut.

Blanket: Floor.

Arms: Tied in knots.

Skin: Unknown.

Feeling my body, I was realizing what I was made up of. Of course, I didn't realize anything else on that list until later by an hour or two. Skin was my first realization. Then, that there was something in my mouth. Oh, that's a tongue. Oh, it feels things. Oh, those are my teeth. They feel things. Slowly I was awakening. Reality was returning to me. Or, this reality.

For the next two hours, I sat/laid on the couch, talking about the pins and needles, unsure of how else to express the space I was in. I was between the atoms, I was between the Quarks. I found the one particle that was me, in a moment, and watched it die. I died. I realized once reflective speech continued that there was nothing real here. I had reached the darkest point of death. The death of a moment's pass. The smallest point of existence is not a quark. Quarks were giant orbs of existence used to build things. Used to spread energy. I was below them in the dark room.

I kept saying, 'I don't believe in Hell, but that was hell. I went to hell.' Hell was the emptiness. The void. The pain of returning though was what haunted me. The fear of the world falling to pieces, and then the fear of what ever was being built in the void of my now cleared mind. But I was back, and I was calm. And I didn't try to kill anyone. Those two hours of waiting were full of revelations, but that lifetime of dying and being reborn was the most torturous experience of my entire life.

I'm smoking it again tonight.

This time, just a little hit.

Easing into things this time.

I need to understand.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 81412
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Oct 7, 2010	Views: 11,589
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Salvia divinorum (44) : First Times (2), Mystical Experiences (9), Small Group (2-9) (17)