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.

Change Your Relationship With the Word

In the beginning there was the word, and it was good. Then over time, it went bad, and nobody seems to want to say it anymore because it is now a dirty word. The word is God.

It was a revelation (another tainted word) to me when I finally realized the only thing sour about the word God and what it meant was my relationship with it. As a child in the 80's and 90's God already was tainted. And maybe it has been for a few hundred years if not more. As I grew up it seemed to be a word that everyone wanted to tiptoe around. Afraid to hurt someones feelings or beliefs, the word took on new meaning and became a dirty word. Now no one knows what God you are talking about. So more specific words are used.

In my youth God meant, some guy in heaven, which is a place i had no conception of where it was located, who could watch you all the time and after you died would read your life's sins to you as he slowly shut the gate to you. It seemed rather bleak from the onset and thus I became an atheist. I turned my back on that no good God in search for something that felt better.

Doesn't that seem crazy though? Why would you need to leave God to find something better? This is how you can tell its been bastardized. As a child i went to churches. All kinds of different ones. And maybe, just maybe, the ancient way of delivering the truth of God had begun to fail.

Through the years I moved on into other realms of study, science, philosophy, oneness, conspiracy theory. None of which were truly fulfilling. Then one day it dawned on me. I had a bad relationship with the word God. I hated when people said it and used it. But why should I? Its just a word. I realized that I had a specific identification of myself that I had developed with it. Which is just a relationship. So i started over, gave God another chance. No longer was some strange unknown figure lurking in the shadows of my mind but now it was literally everything, everyone, no one, and nothing. It was me, and you, and everyone. It began to take form as conscious existence itself. But it only took this form when I decided I wanted a real relationship with life. And in the end, its called God.

Now I can revisit the stories in the bible and see the truth in them. God loves us, heaven is right now, hell is right now, if I SIN, right now. Its like I was lost in some ancient translation and the only way out was to abandon the handed down ways of understanding divinity. Which is very akin to what Jesus experienced himself. A man born into a word feeling separate from an established way of doing things. Lost in his own sea of translation and watching as those who preached their words were just as lost, if not more. Lost in a swamp of identification of self through a sense of authority.

If you want to know God more, let go of everything you know about it, and learn from direct experience with it.

Wrong Side of the Bed

Today I finally realized the real reason for depression and praying before bed. They dont really sound like two things that belong in the same sentence. One is a mental issue and another is about religion. Or at least those have been the associations of the terms for the past few decades. The truth is that they are both intimately linked to the same delusion. That we are separate from god.

This post come from my perspective, a spiritual student. Scientists will suggest that there is a problem with the brian and that you need medication for depression. Although, obviously, the brain chemistry is different, it is not the actual problem. For some strange reason scientists think its best to dope people up rather than help them change their perspective, which is the real issue for the problem in the first place. The truth is that depression is natural, just as being spiritual is natural. Its simply a matter of a perception. And this may be the problem with healing depression. Scientists dont understand the missing element. Carl Young was a spiritual scientists and understood the need for this knowledge. Not believe, but knowledge. Meaning that he understood you needed to have a relationship with divinity.

Drugs alter the perception of the brain and making the problem seem to "go away". But this does not actually fix the problem. The problem is that as we remain immature when a truly maturing human grows spiritually and develops a relationship with god. Depression is a misguided perception on life.

I woke up this morning really out of sorts. I woke up fine, at 11am, sun bright and warm in my room, queen size bed and me spread out on it, my guinea pig squeaking for food and attention. But for some reason I felt grumpy. I could tell I was a bit depressed and had no idea why. I ended up on a call with a client of mine, logo designs werent right, he needed more. I wasnt sounding happy, felt like I could'nt deliver. I realized my energy was very low.

After some time feeling this way I realized I needed to raise my energy. I ate some oatmeal for fibre, which will burn the “engines” hot and give me steady energy. I had some green tea and even a banana. All great things for high energy. But even after all that I still didnt feel well. I went and sat down and picked up the first book that was lying around and it was a book on chakras that I had looked through here and there. I flipped it open and the exact section I flipped to spoke about the 6^th chakra being low in energy, and that this was the problem with feeling depressed. What it said next was a reminder to me, for this was something I had already known, but had recently forgotten. I was a part of God. It said that this is the simple key to depression. Wanting to know my divine connection and asking to remember that, then letting the answers (revelations) come.

The depression is alleviated instantly. The purpose for spirituality is not to feel special, but to remember the fact that you are a part of something bigger than yourself. We need food or we starve, we also need spiritual food, or else our spirit starves and we become depressed, aggressive, uneasy, agitated, and generally unaccepting of any other way but our own.

As I lay in bed it dawned on me that what had happened that day was that I had woken up godless. I forgot who I was, where I was, and temporarily forgot my relationship with my divine roots. This is the real reason for prayer. Not to pray for the things we want but simply to remember the relationship with god that we have naturally. Not in a religious sense, but as reality. So when you go to bed, pray. Remember oneness, remember love, remember compassion and remember kindness, remember a reality that loves you and only wants the best for you, remember gratitude and remember your timeless self. Then sleep. I think then, the morning will feel quite different.

Welcome to the afterlife

If you have spent some time trying to get a grasp on the idea of infinity, then you probably have realized that reality itself is infinite. Understanding reincarnation is not far off then. If I have lived infinite times then that means I have been every animal, every person, in all of the vastness of reality. Then it also means I am those beings right now and will be them in the future. So if that is the case then the reality is that you have died before and will do so again, as I am sure you already know.

The conclusion I find most fascinating is that all of this means that the life we experience now is the afterlife. There are a lot of religions in the world who imagine the afterlife to be some glorified palace in the clouds. Could this simply be perpetual wishful thinking of some better time to come that humans consistently suffer from? It reminds me of retirement. People , who slave away their whole lives, imagine they will be happy after they are done their years of servitude, only to question, in the end, what it was all for.

I think this is a natural way of thinking for us. We spend our time and energy hoping for some happy time to come instead of learning to enjoy the journey.

If this indeed the afterlife, I am in either heaven or hell? Well, doesn't it feel sometimes like the pain of a dark moment will never end? Then, through revelation (a revealing) we discover more about ourselves and are released from under the thumb of some dark thought. We are enlightened. From there we enter into the gates of heaven in this very moment. Not in some time to come. This is the very basis for "My father has many mansions", a famous quote by Jesus Christ.

If you have come to terms with your mortality then the reality of these ideas are not so scary. It seems like the more someone runs from the idea of their mortality, the farther from they find themselves from God, and the more they find themselves in hell and darkness. Because, at least in my view, most people don't seem to "go there", it may be that only a rare few do so willingly and the rest will go through some trama that forces them to see this. This is one way that God works.

It doesnt feel so bad being dead does it? We are duality and all things at once. We are dead and alive, we are happy and sad, loving and fearful. We are living potential. We seem to move in waves through hell then back into heaven.

From time to time we wish we could purely live in those heavenly moments and forget about darkness altogether. This is why we find ourselves in hell so much of the time. If you realized you were in both then you wouldnt need one or the other. Both exist together as one. This, I think, is the balanced type of thinking we are meant to discover as we mature. We are meant to live in harmony with reality but we cannot do that if we do not see reality, indeed ourselves, in its true nature.

I think any type of polarized thinking is hindering of potential because it takes away from the other side. How could you surf if you had no waves? How could you live if you did not have death. How could you love if there was not fear. How could you see you are given everything you need in life if you only choose to see that what you get is never enough. The fact is that both are true. But the limited mind will only choose one option. This behavior limits true potential of the self and in my mind breaks the bond between balance. This is where disease comes in.

When we are lost to a world of polarized identification then we lose the self that is limitless potential. Sickness and disease are signals to us, they are clear messages, typically fallen on deaf ears.

The goal is clear. To find balance in life. To live as intended by divinity itself. Not to argue and distract, but to find clarity and become free. We must learn to see where we are agreeing with being polarized. The only power we have to truly change is through the gift of awareness.

"The secret inlet into the realm of what is timeless and eternally true is our awareness of the present moment; for our awareness of now is not an awareness of a given time, but is vested in that higher consciousness through which the things of time move in and
out of creation."

-- Guy Finley

Ignorance is only bliss to a part of you that wishes to stay divided from knowing your true limitless self.

Finding lost keys to the mansions

I used to study the Mayan year of 2012 but lost interest. I had all about given up on this date and the non stop stories of predictions that people have to go with it. Recently I came across a new 2012 video that explained what the Mayan perspective on the date and their cultures ultimate downfall because of their sheer ignorance of the truth. Through countless lifetimes of history keeping they knew that cycles of time and energy repeated themselves. They saw the universe of pattern and waves and saw that it has predictability. They knew a great change was coming. What they didnt know was that it would be the conquering spaniards and priests that came with them. The mayan leaders allowed themselves to be captured by the spaniards and were subsequently murdered. Then the Spaniards proceeded to murder millions of people, wiping out an entire continent. The Mayans were so mezmerized by their imagination of what change was coming that they didnt realize the truth of possibilities. If everything is a wave then the mayans were a culture at the top. But a wave doesnt fall instantly, it takes time to descend. I think the Mayan civilization may have been coming down from its high point and sinking to such a low point they would practically disappear.

If this is true, that a universal law is that everything acts as waves but in different scales then we should be able to see it in our lives. The fact is that we already know waves are everywhere and everything. Particles dont act like particles unless being observed, they act like waves. When they are observed waves of observation cancel out the natural flow of those waves. So it becomes quite obvious that, of course, reality has giant waves just as we would experience them in each second, minute, hour, day, year, lifetime. Think about the highs and lows you go through constantly. Now imagine you are a larger entity, like a global society, or the earth in general. You would still experience waves except in your own relative scale. If that is true then what is coming. We should be able to see something happening already.

So where we go from here is endless. This is where all the theorists come in an try to predict what may happen. Maybe we find enlightenment, maybe we go extinct, maybe the universe starts over, maybe we flip and become the opposite portion of the universe for a while. This sort of thinking was a place I spent much of my time. But as I said before it is also a place I have moved away from. I began to realize the delusional nature of it. The idea hit me that I am wasting my time and energy trying to predict the future when the truth was the only thing compelling me to do that was my fear of it. This is why the predictions are always so, messy. If we were content with our own reality and mortality then why would we need to look anywhere else for anything else?

We look because we are afraid, we are afraid because we are ignorant of who we really are. Who we really are is part of the infinite existence. You have lived infinite times, including this one. This is not new to you, which is why any revelation feels more like remembering. We are reality and we must exist in all forms. In you exists all things. You can change your consciousness in a heartbeat from human person in reality to the entity of all reality itself. You are it. There is no one out here, this is not my typing, believe it or not its actually a reflection of your mind. That is the truth. But its also true that it is just out there, that I am just writing it. We are all consciousness and infinitely connected. This was just a reminder. :D

The path of life and death

Lately as I contemplate death and the near death experiences myself and others around me have had, I realized how greatful I am for the fact that I have survived all these years. There are many times that one wrong move would have ended my life but, as they say, life finds a way.

As these ideas dawn on me I compare them to ideas of quantum reality. I started to ask - "why me? why did I survive and why do others die? why did I not die?". This line of thinking inevitably lead me to the realization that we do indeed die every minute of our lives. All those ignorant tricks that should have killed you, did. If you die every moment then how are you still living? As reality splits off into all possibilities we must consider that we experience death in each moment as our new self is born.

You may say that this sounds wrong because why do other people die around you and do not continue with life. Life appears to end but does indeed continue. Death is merely a point of perception. Though we may move through our life with these possible deaths that does not mean that the bodily form you are in doesn't expire. It does cease to take the form it is in, but it moves into other forms. The big question is where do I go after this body dies?

If you think about dying every possible way through your life yet still find yourself experiencing the living experience then you should start to see that you are not your body. You are merely experiencing this event in life. The real question is "who are you?". We forget who we are. We are infinite life experiencing itself. To see this you must realize that you are death and life on all levels, not just this life. I think this can be hard to do for most people because most souls develop a strong identification with their body and believe so whole heartily that they are their body that they fear death.

I do not say for certain that i know where you go when you die but if you need to ask that question then you should ask where you are when your living. It is not an easy question to answer. I think that is because you are everywhere. When you die you will still be everywhere. Its hard for people to see how we are all one until you actually start to look at these questions. I dont think we are separate, only our bodies and souls appear to be.

Next time you are sitting with a friend or at work or just with other people, try to imagine your observing consciousness inside each of them. Try to see that their consciousness in that moment is the same as the one inside of you. If you can fathom that and see it then your on your way to seeing oneness. Expand that to the trees, to the rocks, to the air, to the wind and water. See that all this life is you and it is its specific nature for a reason, just as you are.

What would it be like to be infinite? Ponder that for a while. Hopefully you will find yourself staring at reality and seeing that it represents exactly what it would be like to be infinite. So if you are part of infinity, then you are infinity, but within that you also have a finite part to experience. And thus is the life of infinite life. The path of life and death.

The New Golden Beta Male Age

There is an idea that there are only two responses in life. Fight or Flight. We need a new way and I think the new-age and metaphysics community is bringing an ancient spiritual secret back to life. The Secret is flow. And its about time we decided to truely go with the flow.

In social animals, the alpha male is the individual in the community with the highest rank. He controls groups and his external environment and this makes him the protector. I think we are reaching a level where we understand we dont need this level of consciousness. And that this consciousness in fact limits our potential by its very nature. Along with this we can also see that "Flight" or fleeing, is also fruitless. Fear that makes creatures run or fight is meant for something more in the human being. We have the unique privilege to discover this unique nature called the human experience. Fear is a guide for the inner nature. Fear does not take place in your soul. It is an energy that speaks to you. It speaks to you constantly.

This new age of being I like to call, the age of the beta male. What I mean by beta is is we are a work in progress. A beta male would realize this fact and allow himself/herself to be changed by reality itself. Just as you would call a piece of software that is still in development. We are a beta version under constant development and meant for higher purpose. Individually as humans we grow one moment at a time. Minute by minute we are affected by the world around us and we become new people with every beat of our heart. We are doing this collectively as a species. We are really young as a species so the relationship we have with life is that of a teenager. We are scared, not sure what the world will have waiting for us when we actually decide to go with it, and wish someone would just pay our bills and hug us. Its time to take your life into your hands and let the universe show you yourself in the multicolored pool of its infinite waters.

They say the universe is expanding. We are the universe. We are all experiencing growing together and growing wiser together at the same time. I think this is why groups will feel like there is a great awakening happening from time to time. And it may be more true than we realize. Though it may be limited to bursts of awakenings, as the 60's hippy revolution and even the renascence, none the less we are walking on the water and experiencing the waves of life that reveal our true potential and purpose.

So what has people running to the hills over 2012? This is the same mode of fear we jump into when we are faced with a real truth. In this case it would be the fact we all die and that we dont yet know what happens after. That the unknown is more prevalent than the known. If you get over that nature then you are left realizing there are infinite possibilities, infinite lives to live.

Here is a link to an old documentary I made about the mayan calendar and 2012. Its basic info and my perception of reality has shifted greatly since then. But its worth a watch if you have 10 minutes to spare.
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/the-mayan-calendar-2012-and-beyond-full/3jpz6ghv?from=sharepermalink

They say at 2012 the world with end as you know it. But that is a vague statement. So many people live in fear that they automatically assume that means it will be destroyed. This is their current nature so this is all they can see. The truth is that the earth is always ending as we know it. Because how we know it keeps changing. I think we may be destined for a significant change as we always seem to be. Though this does not mean totally annihilation of the physical world. It could mean an annihilation of our inner reality. Apocalypse literally means a revealing. When the inner reality changes the outer one changes too. Afterall the universe is a reflection of your soul.

The truth will set you free.