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I thought I commented before, but I must have thought better of it.

Anyway, from what you've written I have the opinion that you are quite "in tune" with your consciousness (as evidenced in your lucid descriptions of your interior existence), and thus may be more succeptible (read "able") than most to go into hyperspace with salvia. It sounds to me like the 20x propelled you into a really poweful trip that anyone, despite their bravado assurances to the contrary, would have been rocked by.

Please don't listen to anyone tell you that your harrowing experiences are their mild buzzes. They are not. Very powerful salvia experiences and rather pleasant light ones have many of the same defining characteristics. You need to scale back your dosage. Just go buy some 5x or quality raw leaf.

It's much better to work your way up. Another of those whopping doses might scare you off salvia for good. Some of my best experiences were my earliest ventures with raw leaf.

As to your new post. Salvia has exposed your consciousness to novel experience which it didn't formerly know, and my guess is that this can break apart encrusted thought patterns and habitual thinking. Such experience might triggger new neural connections as your consciousness reconfigures itself to process/accept the new input.

I would also caution you, since you've had seizures and so on, to go light with the salvia. There may be no real risk, but you might not want to overdo it.

Chewing quid, if you can get good leaf, is a great experience IMHO.

I wanna' add one more thing about why most "authorities" don't believe that salvia and other "entheogens" reveal other dimensions or conscious states to us. I think it's because they think, perfectly reasonably, that if such a significant thing existed (as other consciouss dimensions and spiritual experiences), than certainly the great achievers, great minds, and other pillars of our civilization would have told us about it!

I got a master's (in a liberal art no less) without EVER hearing of this stuff even once, at least not directly through my formal education. We are cultural beings and I think except for the very rare individual we are extremely concerned with other people and society in general. If our society, as we know it (most don't read Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception", or the writings of Alan Watts on LSD and the spiritual experience) doesn't take such things seriously, than we may feel they aren't really any more worthy of serious interst than are unicorns.

What people don't really think about is that the sorts of experiences salvia brings, and those that seek or partake in them, have been shunned or persecuted throughout history. The reason for this is that such knowledge of ANOTHER reality destroys the authority by which power is manifested by those holding the reigns of power in consentual reality.

Another way of saying it that those running the game don't want people to discover that it's just a game, and the master's control is only over the game. And the masters themselves certaintly don't want to discover this for themselves, so they vehemently reject and persecute the mere prospect.

But it IS real, as anyone who dares to know for his or herself can easily discover. Reality is much more than what the average uninitiated person thinks it is. As Terence McKenna put it, the thought of people going to the grave without ever experiencing transcendant experiences (such as via DMT or Salvia), is as sad as people dying without ever having sex, and it's probably worse.

I've found that even some of the very best thinkers (such as the biologist E.O. Wilson), have a bit of a flat spot when it comes to the topic of psychedelics. Salvia can show one another realm of consciousness/existence (like a place or other dimension) that one otherwise will likely never stumble upon. Those who've only known "consensual reality" not only may not believe any other exists, but they have no way of beginning to envision it.

Early on in my Salvia explorations, I remember being shocked to discover such a "place" existed, and also that almost nobody else even suspected its existence. I wouldn't have envisioned such a kind of beingness, because I had no leads, no related experience. I can hardly expect others who haven't crossed over to believe in something like "the other side".

Those who assume "this is all there is" naturally come to the conclusion that anything unlike "this" has got to be a distorted and inferior version of "this". But, it's not "this" at all, it's something entirely "else".

Here's a silly analogy. Those who think this is thet only reality against which all others are inferior distortions are like oranges who think bananas are pale, dried up, meaty oranges.

I liked watching Daniel imbibe the salvia. He really had the look of knowing exactly what he was getting into, and kind of bracing himself for it, even if "bracing" meant trying to relax.  I was more nervous watching him smoke it than the other guy.

I agree about the open-minded psychologist and the closed minded pharmacologist. Also strange that the only real expert on Salvia there was Daniel, and it's kinda' insulting that his views were presented as less significant, ultimately, than those of the authorities present who never even tried salvia.

When the pharmacologist started talking about salvia giving a pleasurable quasi-delusional state; or that salvia brings on giggling the same as having a bit of beer; or that it doesn't cause REAL hallucinations; I kinda thought it would be really nice to talk to him after his first major breakthrough.

Daniel did say some good stuff about people being afraid to let go of consensual reality. Yes, there IS something else out there, and yes one does "remember" some of it as well.

The movie kinda' makes salvia look like a lightweight, which is probably OK.

Or was it Anna Karenina? Um, the book the girl injected herself with Windex after reading, or in the midst of reading. She was someone I knew well, and she had a blue splotch on her arm. When I asked how she got it she confessed to the Windex thing. She wasn't the type to make it up.

I guess people need grounding before reading Dostoevsky, seeing certain movies, listening to Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd (weren't those the groups that "caused" kids to kill themselves?), or doing any "entheogen". It's a tough world out there. At least I know I'm a bit frail sometimes and thus take precautions.

I said way too much.

I remember reading the article and thinking it had some good and bad, and the trying to link the kid's suicide to salvia was the bad, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm always skeptical of stories in which people do things, like work out or go swimming, while tripping balls on salvia. Once, when I first started using salvia, I smoked a couple or three bowls of raw leaf, and stumbled to my bed in the next room. I barely made it. I could barely walk at all. As soon as I lay down my ceiling became vaulted.

I've been frozen in place sitting on the edge of my bed after smoking salvia, unable to move, or remember that I ever was able to move.

In my experience, if the salvia isn't strong enough to cause me to lose contact with external reality as well as the ability to function physically, it isn't strong enough for me to really trip on. Thus, if I'm out there smashing skateboards through windows (as opposed to frozen on a park bench or lying on the ground), I'm not really tripping hard at all.

Well, that's just my experience with salvia and makes me highly skeptical of people's reports of movement, and also reports of orgasms while tripping in other dimensions. I wouldn't even remember I had a penis if I'd gone in far enough. I couldn't string the words together to form the thought.

People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons, and salvia, if anything, might make me afraid to do so. Rather, it might remind me that I'd better take advantage of this life to prepare for death, when one might find one's self in real serious shit with no cozy body or delusions to hide away in.

Oddly, his salvia report is not so different from what others find beneficial. After following some rather depressing politics, I found one salvia trip that showed me it was all about as meaningful as a board game (from anther exalted perspective) made me feel a whole lot better.

My GUESS is the kid wasn't that happy to begin with, that salvia didn't help him that much, and he probably had suicidal tendencies. That's my GUESS. His interpretation of what he learned from salvia apparently didn't brighten his outlook, and it may have contributed to him being depressed. OK.

One thing I wouldn't do is take salvia when I was depressed! Hey, let's hyperpower my depression and see just how miserable I can be in another dimension?!?! Don't trip when you aren't content with yourself.

I think the salvia may have contributed slightly to the kid's unhappiness, but was not responsible for it in the main. Meditating or reading Nietzche or Dostoevsky might have also depressed him. I actually knew a girl who injected herself with Windex after reading "Crime and Punishment".  No joke.

Sure, she was a bit wacked emotionally. But, they still keep the dangerous Dostoevsky in the libraries of all places.

Just my humble opinions which Salvia would show me are complete mental constructions having little to do with reality more than just manipulation of the symbols of language.

Folks, I'm in Thailand for a good long while, though not for the ulterior motives that draw so many. I've even done an intensive 10-day meditation course.

I don't know if salvia is available or legal here, and I certaintly don't ever want to have any reason for the Thai police to come after me.

But, I might like to do some work with salvia again. The climate may be hospitable for growing, I'm not sure.

Just wondering if anyone's here as well, and partaking of salvia realms.

bye.

One more idea. Witnessing the dismantling of the mind, and the dismantling of how the mind holds onto reality, gives insight into death. I've often thought that when people die they might have something LIKE a salvia experiencek, partly because so many of my salvia experiences were like death.

Here's an observation or two. From the standpoint of the dying person, the world doesn't continue to exist without them, but, rather, they continue to exist without the world. Their ability to hold onto the world breaks down, probably as the brain ceases to function. There's a feeling of really being left out, and one comes to appreciate why even the most miserable people often cling desperately to life when there is a sudden risk to their life. We don't wanna' be left out. What comes after that seems to be in many stages or levels.

Those are just some impressions I've got from my salvia experience. Enough jabbering away.

I say it IS a spiritual experience, even though the cause is inarguably a forced change in brain chemistry.

But what happens when one's brain chemistry is so changed? Well, many, myself included, typically experience the complete disintigration of the ego. The erasure of the ego is the foundation of most reported spiritual experiences throughout history. Whether it comes about through spontaneous changes in consciousness, or forced one's, the ego is still demolished.

One thing salvia does very well is destroy/dismantle/disolve/erode the abstract, language-based, mental superstructure we impose on reality and take for reality itself.

Often, after using salvia, people experience being really "outside" of everything they've known for the first time. This manifests itself in many different ways, but, it is being conscious without one's consciousness being circumscribed by our mental projections on reality.

Another thought. The experiences are definitely REAL, just as one REALLY has dreams, but, like the dream, the salvia trip isn't REAL in the sense that the experience can't be observed or documented in any way in consensual reality.

However, people often say, and it's my experience, that the salvia episode can impact one as far MORE real than everyday life. My guess is that it's because the consciousness is immersed in a direct reality rather than the rhetorical superstructure our minds normally exist in.

There's much more to it than that, but, how the experience is produced is not as important as what the experience is, and what salvia does is extremely instructive in terms of immediate understanding (verses intellectually comprehended ideas) of the nature of reality, of consciousness, and of the ultimate facade of typical mental consciousness.

To me this sounds like it has all the hallmarks of an outstanding learning experience of a very spiritual nature. In that sense it's not bad at all.

But, a salvia "trip", in my experience, can manifest some of the same qualities and characteristics whether it is a light jab, or a knock-out punch of a trip.

An extremely intense trip may be described with much the same sorts of words and phrases as a much lighter version of the same thing. In my case, when I've given trip reports, people respond with much more interest in my descriptions of my lighter episodes. For the episodes that were too strong, I could only use the same sorts of descriptions but add exclamation points...

The salvia is also interacting with your mind, your being, your essence, and you may be a 5X, 10X, or 100X consciousness (in terms of receptivity or openness), at least at a particular time.

In YOUR case, it doesn't sound like you need 10X to trip on, or at least not so much of it. Some people are hard heads, some say salvia does nothing... They may need to smoke a lot more than you do.

I recommend chewing quid, taking tincture, or smoking quality raw leaf. Daniel Siebert's standardized leaf is reliable (I think it's 6x). I used to use a scale and dose up until I found the most productive level trip.

Overdoing it is not a good idea 'cause it can scare you off of salvia, and you'll miss out on it's instruction. I believe Salvia is an awesome teacher. But, take it gradually: even the lighter trips are very instructive.

And don't think just because someone else smoked three bowls of 12x, says he flew into the sun and was burned alive and LOVED IT, that you need to match the dosage. Salvia just doesn't work that way.