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yo,


first i would like to thank you all for the kind supportive words. i was initially afraid of my own perceptions, and what they meant, as well as how other people would recieve them. i felt like a madman for a long time. so to put this out there was a leap for me. this has given me confidence to be as real as i can be about it, and put it out there in more places.


i edited my account to include some impressions that i had not put in there, probably the most disturbing ones of all. i can still feel it. bleh. when i wrote that out, i had to go back in and experience that nightmare again. i feel the same way again now -  i had to finally scrape the last of the seeds out of the pumpkin with this edit, and this post script.



i now feel like i have had time to digest some of what happened to me - i am calming down, and adjusting to my 'regular' life - i was very out-of-context when all of this stuff happened, and now i have had distance from that time and space and i am viewing these events within the safety of a 'familiar place'. and there were definitely 'other factors' that were contributing to my insanity.
 
when i described it to people in the first couple of days after the experience, i said 'it was like she shuffled the deck, and slipped in a few extra cards.'  

i got more than one response of 'let's hope they were jokers/wild cards!'

i think that, though she completely razed 'the old me' to the ground in a dramatic show of terrible, furious power, The Shepherdess also gave me the swift, brutal insight i needed to get myself out of a situation in which i ought not have put myself in the first place. she showed me the TRUE nature of 'SALVATION/DAMNATION'.  

she showed me that we can be harbingers of light and truth and balanced living, or that we can incubate the ravenous darkness whose cancerous chaos is eating our entire species, as well as our world.


Shepherdess indeed.


wantonly doing everything you want to do when you want to do it creates a wave of destruction [borne on the leathery wings of selfishness] that ripples out and touches all of us. every thought we think matters, regardless of whether or not you think anyone "hears" it. every action we do or do not perform has it's own effect, either way you choose!

there is no reason we cannot all promote the natural balance of life and death, live out natural cycles of destruction and renewal, giving and taking, and honor the natural Flow. it feels, though, in these times that we have created together [we ALL have to take responsibity for this shit - georgie wouldn't be there if we hadn't, AS A WHOLE, wanted him to be], that the balance is tipping, and that death and chaos are beginning to gain momentum. we could choose to change all of this. tiny actions do matter. SOME people would like for us to think that the momentum towards destruction is unstoppable, that the prophecies must be fulfilled and that there will be an ultimate destruction of our race and planet in some kind of major holocaust or judgement. believing this, we support and enflesh the idea,  and run with it straight into the vampiric tentacles of damnation. we've let ourselves be convinced that we are ineffectual, that we have no power. each of us, however, is within easy access to an infinty of power, if we choose to hold our true place within the flow of that power, and honor that in a way detached from the grip of our egos.

we don't have to be magicians. we just have to live true lives.

we can choose to flourish and thrive, and to make life worth living for ALL of us on this planet, and it will Flow on with just the right balance of delights and disasters.

am i preachin to the choir? sorry, but i feel pretty religious these days, yall.


and i am standing by everything i said in regards to the usage of salvia. that experience was all too real to disregard what i saw. however, it is beginning to become easier to assimilate what it means to me, which in itself could continue to change as i grow and continue to seek my truth and learn more about SELF and OTHER. i DO understand that she is one to be approached with no small amount of reverence.

i would like to echo the sentiment that, if you choose to work with this plant, it might prove to be more mutually beneficial for you both if you GROW HER YOURSELF. if you care for her, she might be more apt to care for you. [i cannot say that with anything more than a STRONG sense of intuition, and the reliable word of my friendly neighborhood jaguar.]

all that being said. i STILL ain't goin back! i got 'gifted' with enough insight and wisdom that i feel it would be redundant, inappropriate, unwise, and even ungrateful, in a way, to go back again.

not to mention that she is fierce, and scares the shit out of me.


okay, that's enough hippie bullshit out of me. you awl tawlk amongst yahselves.

MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHER


I had an experience with salvia which, in light of the things i have read on these messageboards, i have decided was unique amongst the unique, and i feel it is my sacred duty to report this experience wherever this plant is being discussed, so here goes.


i'll start with some basic background info on myself. i am not a well-travelled, experienced psychonaut. i have never smoked dmt [not that it would've prepared me for salvia anyway]. i have actually been quite out there on mushrooms, so i do know what it is to be completely gone in a 'heroic dose' kind of way. however, i am pretty tapped-in naturally, so to compound my natural state with hallucinogens is not a thing i particularly crave all that often.


i had an older friend who was my teacher. he is the one who first told me of salvia. he described his first experience to me, how it was very out-of-body, and how it positively changed him in 'subtle' ways through certain knowledge that the plant imparts. the prospect of this quite tantalized me. beyond this, i had no knowledge of the plant whatsoever - no internet research on its history, or the 'trip reports' of others, or that handy-dandy 'user guide' which so thoughtfully provides people with that nifty little S-A-L-V-I-A scale. i trusted the word of my friend, however, and i eventually decided to try it with him.

i smoked it out of a water pipe, three good hits of straight leaf, no extract. i then lay back with eyes closed. i felt the distinct impression of gently materializing inside a shimmering, aquatic antechamber, some kind of entry hall or foyer. i saw a beautiful green lady float up to me. she had the sweetest, most benevolent face, full of infinte love and patience and kindness towards me. she looked at me, shook her head 'no' gently, playfully tapped me on the nose, and swam away. that was my experience. i knew i had not broken through, that she had told me i was not yet ready, and to come back later.

i thought no more about doing salvia divinorum for a long time; occasionally she entered my thoughts, but i knew that my next experience would happen when it was supposed to. this was a couple of years ago.

fast-foward to october 29, 2005.

one of the people i was staying with for the month went to a festival where he bought some 7x fortified leaf. he came back and five of us decided to try it. we turned the lights down and got out the bubbler. the guy who had bought the stuff packed a bowl full, hit it a couple of times, and passed it on to me. i puffed and passed it on, etc. my puffs were tentative, and nothing happened to me or anyone else, while the guy who'd packed and started the bowl had a nice little experience during which he laughed a couple of times. we laughed nervously with him, wondering what was so damn funny. when he came out of it he said how it was such a good punch in the face, and how it made him feel like a warrior for being able to go there.

i felt rejected. i had good, pure intentions - i TRULY wanted to know what the plant had to tell me - i wanted in there! part of me hesitated, and i thought for a second that maybe i was someone who wasn't meant to go there at all. my desire to KNOW got the better of me, though, and a fresh bowl was packed for me. i ripped two HUGE hits. after the second i felt a big golden WHOMMMMMM envelope me, and i knew i was going whether i liked it or not. i almost felt her say, "okaaaay, little man, you asked for it..."

i quickly lost all control of my body.

i was immediately plunged into these repeating frames of time, and as i had neglected to close my eyes, i saw/felt the room i was in, my universe, and my Self being completely and quite literally UNZIPPED. i SAW the fucking teeth of the zipper SEPERATING. i thought to myself, "what have we done? we decided to smoke this shit, and somehow we accidently ripped a hole in reality, and the building blocks of the universe are tumbling because of something WE  DID!" i thought it was Over - i'd just made The Ultimate Cosmic Goof - whoops! it was SO uncomfortable, to the point of being nearly unbearable, but a voice said, 'just hang on and ride it out.' i knew i had to follow the zipper all the way around [to the right], and that it would zip back up.

simultaneously during and/or after this terrifying segment, i was aware of the letters.

at this point, i must again stress that i had still, QUITE FOOLISHLY, done NO RESEARCH on this plant. I HAD NEVER HEARD OF OR READ ABOUT THE 'MNEMONIC EXPERIENTIAL SCALE.'

but somehow, there my helpless, terrified, stripped down and unzipped [SHE COULD SEE ME - MY BARE ESSENCE - AND SHE WAS JUDGING ME] consciousness was, bouncing along like a piece of fruit in a ms. pac man maze, bouncing from letter to letter of the word SALVIA.

with each successive letter, the last letter would fall off in scales and another 'layer' or 'level' would peel away and open up to the next. it was this horrible little game that i was playing - i knew that 'once you decide to play THIS game, you have to finish it out'. i knew it was THE ULTIMATE, and it was so cutesy, with this colourful, pastel sesame street kind of vibe, which made it all the more horribly macabre and sinister at the same time, because EVERYTHING ELSE HAD BEEN UNZIPPED - IT WAS ALL THERE WAS.

"THIS 'TRIP' HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LETTER 'S', THE LETTER 'A', THE LETTER 'L'...."

[it was so synthetic and WRONG, like she was saying "look at me - i'm a designer plant fucking EXPERIENCE now! ARE YOU ENJOYING ME?!?!?!?" it didn't feel like a plant AT ALL to me, but like a SYNTHETIC, man-made substance designed to approximate what salvia should be like??]

[i am shuddering as i type this.]

i was out of control.

i made it to the letter 'I'. i knew somehow i was not going to the end of the word. this relieved me.

then there was a blending conversion of the word 'salvia' into 'salvation', and the word 'divinorum' became 'damnation.' i knew this was the name of the game we were playing:

SALVATION/DAMNATION.

there was a passing that happened. i was passing along... something, in a chain of people.... we were passing along some kind of information or awareness. 'hereletmeshowyouthis, hereletmeshowyouthis, hereletmeshowyouthis...' i felt like i'd been tricked into playing this game, and had already been tricked into it before i decided to play, that i should've known better than to do this and to fuck with my consciousness in such a drastic way, and to open myself up to this dimension where i was quite vulnerable and not ready to be. and i knew there was no way to UN-KNOW what i now knew. it was like "here is this terrible, gorgeous, maddening, awful, stupid, necessary secret we had to show you. we're sorry. congratulations." it was a TREMENDOUS weight on my soul.

the main person i remember, who was next to me in the chain, was my 'friend' who had first told me about salvia. i time-travelled back to a point at which we'd had a conversation about her long ago - he was telling me 'you can hang on to a good thought and have that, or you can have a bad thought with it and be stuck holding that - be careful'. i was also aware that i had been in this place before - this wasn't the first time i had played this 'game'.

after this, things eased up a bit, and there was a tiny bearable moment where i knew how to exist as smoke or vapour, in between layers of reality, and i was becoming 'me' again. then my surroundings came back into view, the room and the people around me, but the choppiness of the overlapping time frames of re-entry was again so brutal to me that i began to get angry and distressed, and quite impatient for it to be over. i came back in my body enough to try to climb over the back of the couch, but i realized i was going to fuck the room up if i tried that too soon, so i turned back around, and i felt her tell me 'hold on just a second longer - we'll get you out of here. it's almost over.'

and i was holding my breath, my face so red it was about to pop, my companions yelling at me to BREATHE! and i inhaled, exhaled a horrible scream, and then it was like i was coming out of this TUBE, this fleshy, living exit tube, AND IT SPIT ME OUT, AND I FELL BACK INTO MY BODY WITH A HEAVY THUD, SLUMPING ALL THE WAY FORWARD TILL I WAS LAYING OVER MY KNEES, STARING AT THE FLOOR.

it was over.

one of my first spoken coherant thoughts was, "how CRUEL that plant was to do that to me! how CRUEL!"

my next was "CRAZYCANYOUHELPIT!? CRAZYCANYOUHELPIT!? CRAZYCANYOUHELPIT?!" I asked my sitters if i had repeated that, or if anyone else had said it. the answer was no.

since i had been so terrified and resisted throughout the whole experience, there were parts of the experience that i had to block out as being too much for my sanity to handle at the time. i knew that there had been a "game of getchagimme, a game of reshuffling, of alphabet dominoes," which is how i described it afterwards in my journal, but i wasn't sure what the letters had been.

i did know that there was something horribly artificial about the letters, like it was some fucked-up, trademarked parker brothers board game [ahem], which wasn't at all jiving with my impression of what entheogen exploration is supposed to be all about. i remember being acutely aware of this, within the trip, when the letter-bouncing started happening. i was shocked that these letters seemed infused, BUILT-IN to the experience, and i wondered if it was like the title splash-screen of a video game, and everyone who smoked her saw the same letters, right before their 'game' started, before their 'fun-house' experience became whatever it became.

so after my experience, some other events transpired, especially on halloween night, that caused me to realize that the people i had been associatng with and trusting [INCLUDING THE ONE WHO INTRODUCED ME TO SALVIA] did not at all have my best interests at heart.

i continued to have some pretty severe 'mental-patient-in-a-rubber-room' kind of thoughts for a couple of weeks afterwards. everyone i trusted got called into question, no matter who they were. it became tiresome for me. i decided to call it 'neutranoia', which is where they're all out to get you, but you just don't give a fuck because what can they do if you don't let them? i worked through all of this stuff with good ol fashioned LOVE. if you get stuck in a hole like this, just remember to love even those who would harm you, those you fear. there is always a way out.

i was driving with a buddy yesterday. we were talking about my experience, which was still maddeningly foggy to me - i knew there were letters, and passing, and a game that wasn't at all a game, and that it had some heavy good-n-evil overtones that were continuing to fuck with me. in the middle of the conversation he mentioned that he'd done some online research [which my dumb lazy ass STILL had not done!] on salvia, and that he'd found out that there was a scale based on the letters of the word SALVIA that denoted the intensity of your trip, and he was pretty sure i had made it to 'I' based on my description.

i felt like i had been punched in the gut.

he had, with one sentence, blown the door off the sepulchre in which i'd sealed away those traumatic secrets.

i immediately got on the computer when i arrived home and started soaking in everything i could about the history and use of salvia, as well as the experiences of you all on boards like this one. i started thinking about what my experience must have meant. to my knowledge thus far, no one else has seen those letters integrated into their experience the way i did. and the whole thing really fucking creeps me out.


so here's the conclusion i have reached.


i think that salvia is not very pleased that she is being put into little foil packets, sometimes even ARTIFICIALLY FLAVORED, and SOLD to the general public [MANY of whom do not understand AT ALL what they are doing!] FOR FUCKING PROFIT by people who are exploiting her as if she were some kind of hallucinogenic FAD. she is not some cute little witch's toy. she is certainly not a 'MEDITATION TOOL'. she is a healer, not a COSMIC VIDEO GAME.

"wow! it was so COOL when i became part of that guy's leg in some village in mexico i've never seen before! AWESOME! I LEARNED SO MUCH!!! i can't wait to see where i end up NEXT TIME!"

ummmm....

i think she feels as though she is being taxed beyond her nature, and that her space is being invaded and her gifts misused by people who are merely CURIOUS AS TO WHERE THEY WILL GO AND WHAT THEY WILL SEE. i don't think we're all supposed to be going there - only certain people who are properly trained and full of a certain kind of purpose should be doing this. as many accounts as there are of people who have tried it once and had experiences so intense and on a par with death, or the universe folding up or being sucked away, and then they say they'll never do it again, it looks like folks would realize that it's a lot more serious than just another 'consciousness expanding substance'. though they may sometimes be more difficult to procure, you DO have access to other avenues of self-exploration - maybe use those and leave her in peace?

[and maybe we're not supposed to know what death is REALLY like until we DIE.]

i know for my part that i won't be disturbing her again.

what you do is your choice. i got my message loud and clear, and i feel with every cell of my being that she wanted me to put this experience out there for people to read. and now i have done as i feel she has asked me to do. i am confident that this will reach those who need to see it. if you are a person who hasn't done it yet, and this report struck a heavy chord in you somehow, maybe reconsider whether or not you do it, or at least how you approach it if you do.

you can take that and do with it what you will. i pray that you all make wise decisions concerning your minds and souls, no matter what you do in your lives. it affects all of us.

"i said i'm takin in
what you believe in ~
it matters now
to you and me"

*tori amos*


"we see a thousand rooms to rest,
helping us taste the bite of death"

*sufjan stevens*

blessed be.