What Salvia Has Taught Me

It was brought to my attention that it would be in mine and others good fortune for me to speak about my experiences with the legal sage plant called Salvia Divinorum. After having many experiences with the plant and then subsequently giving the experience to others and hearing their findings from their "trips" I have come to the conclusion that most other people dont seem to have the means to convey what they experience, or, they simply dont have any context to put anything into words. So they simply cant talk about it because they dont even know what happened. To them it seems to be like a wild blur.

I dont think that I am special and that others are broken but rather I do think I may be sensitive in ways the regular non psychedelic user would be. I had a heavy, and I mean heavy, experience on LSD which seems to have enhanced my experiences by many times thus making me more sensitive to altered states of consciousness. I dont do much when it comes to drinking or drugs, and never really have, because the chemicals naturally running through my body have become quite intense. Again I think simply the act of taking LSD did not make me "special" but rather it altered my perception making my awareness of my internal workings much more clear.

I first came to know of Salvia after hearing Terence Mckenna speak about it. He said "it takes you far beyond what DMT and LSD can do". And in a way he is right. "Its cheap, its legal, its completely natural, and it is the only psychedelic that works the way it does on the brain". Most involve altering serotonin levels but this one does not. I researched it after hearing about Mckennas admiration of the sage. I read that Mazatec Indians would use this plant to speak to spirits. It is also considered an anti depressant, which I have a theory of why that I will go in to later. I really liked the idea of speaking to spirits. This was all in the middle of my big awakening in life. So I tried it initially with the intention of speaking to spirits directly, not just to trip out and have fun, though that is a part of the experience.

Each experience was new and different and to this day each one is unfamiliar and new. Its like entering a whole new dream each time. During one of my first experiences I got my wish and spoke to spirits. I had turned off the lights in my room, turned on my black light, and all that was lit up were the white objects in the room and the rest were just shadows. As I smoked the leaves and exhaled the smoke into the warm purple glow of what light there was, I began to feel as if the shadows in the room were changing. They soon began to take on a presence of beings. They knew I was there and I knew they were there. Then in my minds eye I met more beings, more spirits. They began to tell me that I had opened a window into their world and they could communicate with me now. They told me that I needed to know I am always surrounded by them and that they love me. To put it more simply, I was reminded that I am always surrounded by love but normally I am blind to this fact. I accepted this and was very happy for them telling me. Then they began to put on a show for me. They laughed at me, not in a demeaning way, but in a loving way. It was happiness itself. Then I laughed at them, with them, simply because I was happy. Love gave birth to joy. This, amongst other more random and fun experiences, was one of the gifts given to me from the use of Salvia. It helped me to see life in a whole new way.

Some people think that these "hallucinations" are false because they are in the mind. So they should be discounted. I think thats a very sick way to experience life. All of life is important and it is all a part of something bigger than you. When you experience the world around you while you are sober, you are experiencing it through chemicals inside your body. Because you, in the end, are not just a single person. You are trillions of cells experiencing life at the same time. When the chemicals in your body change, lets say you become happier, your experience of life changes in that moment, but it does not make it less true. it may be only your truth because it is your experience, but none the less it is real and true and a gift. So throwing another chemical into the mix does not make it false. They say that all the chemicals you can consume only work (make you trip out or feel different) because they mimic what is already inside of you. This means that you already have the capacity to experience life in an infinite number of ways. All meant to give you more depth and wisdom about who you are and what your here to do and be.

The second experience I would like to mention happened only a few months ago. I felt a tremendous pressure on my body and in simple terms, we would call it stress. I did not understand where my stress was coming from but the fact is that it was there and it did not feel good. I decided to smoke some Salvia and give myself an altered state which is a break from the norm that develops. When the experience came on I began to see all the objects around me extend and multiply into oblivion. I soon began to realize that I was being shown the life of each object in the room. Each one came from some where, will go some where, is claimed by someone, was made from something, so on and so on. At this realization I knew that each object was causing me this pressure in my life. I felt a responsibility for it all and that this feeling was only brought to the surface after smoking salvia. Normally, it is a subconscious understanding and something we do not see easily. My house is full of these objects and calling any of them mine is a pressure that is damaging. Yet here we are all doing this.. We get a sense of self from the things in our lives because it seems to give our lives purpose. Without it people tend to feel lost. I think this happens because people are normally quite detached from who they truly are. They are not taught when they are young to cultivate spiritual ideas. Its something I was taught a little but ended up needing to give it to myself, which is all of our responsibility.

I let go of the objects and my stress went away, even if it was for just a few days. I realized they can live with me during their lives but that doesnt mean I need them. A part of me likes the feeling of this attachment that it doesnt want the feeling to end. But if I am willing to see the truth then I will see that this type of thinking is causing me, as a whole, more harm than good.

A similar experience happened during my next session but the concept I received was executed quite differently. This time I was laying on my bed and I could feel some stress. It had been a few months since my last Salvia experience. When the experience came on and I was right in the thick of it I realized I felt no stress. I could see the walls were constructed by infinite beings. Not that they were built by them, but built of them. This time taking on the appearance of a small anime character, not any particular one. But I could tell thats what it was. It repeated infinitely. The movement in the room felt like a roadway. Like a busy street. I was in the middle of a crowded area. My whole room was alive and had turned into an English countryside, at least it felt this way. There was intention moving all about the room. I felt the presence of beings claiming ownership of other things, themselves constructed of other beings, and I noticed that I was doing nothing while all this was going on. None of these beings even cared I was here. Though I did get the distinct feeling that they all knew it too. I was now a fly on the wall and nothing in the room, or world for that matter, was my responsibility anymore. All of the responsibility was taken away from me and my job was simple; watch, observe and be free.

The concepts are similar. I am being shown that I develop attachments to things in my world and daily life. The inevitable effect of these attachments, I like to call "normalizing". We become normalized in our daily lives and we need to break the chains that come with them from time to time otherwise we forget that we are free. Some would even say that our trouble is we become attached in the first place. If I have learned anything it is that we as a society teach it to ourselves. We have been grown and developed to be attached and only those who really wish to be free from these feelings that pin us down will seek and find the truth.

Antidepressants and other pharmaceutical drugs are, believe it or not, derived from psychedelic plants and chemicals. All of them effect each patient differently. The problem with these drugs is that they are not used to heal. They are used to cope. So the effect is not noticed. It only dulls the senses enough that a person can live in the same pain without truly going beyond it by becoming more aware of it. As cliche as it may be, companies prey on the ignorance of the masses. Our whole society has moved away from looking at life as life and now looks at it as a machine. If the machine is broken, the parts must be broken, denoting some sort of permanent unfix-able problem. Why there is so much trust put into a system like this baffles me. As far as I can tell its 100% ignorance. People dont want to learn through these types of experiences because they are scared. They were not raised to do so. While thousands of years ago, and even currently in some areas of the world, learning through shamanism and spiritual experiences by controlled drug induced altered states, awakenings and healing go hand in hand.

Salvia should not be taken lightly but then again I am not sure many people experience what I do on it. I dont smoke extract. Some people smoke 5x, 10x, 100x, etc. I only smoke the leaves. I have chewed it before but its the most god awful taste in the world and you cant swallow it for 20 minutes. You must chew it and mush up the leaves and grind them with your teeth for 20 minutes without swallowing. The chemical Salvinorum A is secreted through your saliva glands in your mouth. This is the way it was originally consumed. If you wish to smoke it tho, make sure you have dry leaves, pack a bowl in a water-bong tightly, inhale a good amount then hold it as long as you can. Do not cough. If you know your going to cough then slowly breath out. Take another and repeat if you can. Then when your vision blurs, set down the bong and relax. Let the experience take hold. Please share your experiences with me if you remember them!

My last thought I want to talk about in regards to salvia is its properties as an anti depressant. Depression, to me, is a disconnection from "God". We lose ourselves in normality and no longer feel we have a place in reality. We feel lost and without purpose. When you smoke salvia, and you experience spirits and beings as I have described, you cannot help but reconnect with your true self and with life itself. If your experience is anything like mine, then you meet beings in undescribable amounts. So many in fact that it is more so a feeling of uncalcuable numbers than anything. And they all love you. This alone brings anyone out of depression. You can tell a depressed person you love them and that they are not alone but they do not "know" it. When you experience the same thing in an altered state you know it because you become it. Love touches you deeply and the connection is made.

I believe we, as humans, are meant to live life as we will while periodically consuming compounds that produce positive spiritual experiences, breaking out of any norms we fall in to.