The principles of the mechanics of Salvia spacetime

Salvia Experience #3
Dose: 1 halfway lungful of Salvia 15x standardized (I didn't get it hot enough to get the full effect because the wind kept on putting the flame out on my lighter).

As I get ready to light the Salvia, I have two friends sitting on my left in comfortable wooden lawn chairs. Ahead of me and across to my right is a vista of college dorm buildings (off about a hundred feet away), with the windows of many a room sparkling light out into the night.

I am sitting "Indian-style" on the grass with my shoes and glasses off. There is a cool breeze in the pleasant September evening air.

As I light the Salvia, a gust of wind comes along, and I have a hard time keeping a flame on the Salvia. I finally get a little bit of it hot enough and suck it in and hold it for 20 seconds. It probably wasn't a full hit, though.

About 10 seconds after exhaling, I noticed that familiar effect of my vision beginning to double. Points of light seem to drift apart, or sort of, I guess, like many others describe the effect, "vibrate."

Then I feel a familiar "logarhythmic narrowing of awareness," as I've now come to think of it. I'll sketch out a general scheme of this, and then point out how far I got this time on this logarhythmic scale of awareness.

I also want to point out that, as I was experiencing the effects of this scale during this last time, there seemed to be nothing necessarily profound about it. In fact, its impression on me was so straightforward and seemingly without ambiguity, that it was almost appalling, as if I were to say to myself, "This is IT??? This is the secret to Salvia spacetime, that these tufts of grass and all other physical things are correlated with these proportional square-meter time-slice sandwiches??? This is too simple!!!" In fact, I think I did say similar things to my friend during the experience. So, the point is, even if the subsequent passages seemed profound or complicated or otherworldly or whatnot, in fact that was not at all how I experienced it. As I experienced it, it all was appallingly intuitive and almost prosaic, as if I didn't have to think about it at all, but could just look at the grass and self-evidently see that our awareness of physical dimensions scales proportionally to the size of the time-slice sandwich moments that we work with in order to process time and experience it.

The first scale, at 1 meter, would be the awareness one has of the world in one's ordinary, baseline state. That certain level of capabilities for thinking of things not immediately present, for thinking of things in the past and future, and for thinking in abstractions (like, thinking in terms of concepts like, "homogeneous," "liberalism," "nutrition," etc.) that one ordinarily has.

I say that this level of awareness coincides with "1 meter" because there really is a ridiculously simple physical correspondence, when I am on Salvia, between the scale of one's visual field of view/sense of one's self in terms of physical dimensions, and the scale of awareness and abstract capabilities (how general and broad you can think in terms of).

Time also has a very strict, almost mechanical correspondance with the aforementioned scales. At the normal 1 meter scale, 1 subjectively-experienced second = 1 second.

At the 0.1 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down into the individual moment. Not only does one feel about 1/10th the size as previously, but one can also only think about 1/10th as broadly as before. Concepts like "world peace," "liberalism," "the carbon cycle," etc. recede into an unreachable higher dimension). One's awareness is confined to that invdividual moment, and what is immediately present around one's self.

Sometimes this moment can become symbolized by some physical object. For me during this last time, the moment became symbolized by a sort of yellow Las Vegas neon sign, shaped only into the letter "A." It was not so much a neon sign, as it was a wire frame of the letter A, about literally 10 cm wide at the base, sitting there on the grass, and glowing yellow. When I say, "right there on the grass," I don't mean to say that I "saw" the letter sitting there. Rather, this idea of the letter made its presence known to me right there physically on the grass, through a sort of 6th sense for sensing physical objects without seeing them, but instead feeling them (but not feeling from contact with them, but *feeling* the light coming off of it with physical force on my body, rather than just seeing the light). It was glowing eagerly and in somewhat amusingly sleazy pawn-shop-type of fashion. Perhaps its sleazy self-promotion was an apt metaphor for the culture of self-promotion here at Harvard, which may have occurred to me as I sat and looked at the dorm buildings with their sparklingly lighted windows, indicating students hard at work on the inside, polishing their careers and their marketable image.

Like I said, this "letter A" arrested my attention onto it such that in no way did I have the sense that I might have been imagining it or that I could have ignored its presence. It was, as far as I can tell, an unbidden returning idea from my last Salvia trip, and it simply ordered my attention onto itself, come hell or high water).

Concomitant with this zooming in of awareness is a shrinking of the passage of time. At the 0.1 meter level, 1 subjectively-experienced second lasts only 0.1 seconds in the "real world." So one must pass through about 10 seconds to pass through 1 second in the real world. This, however, is only an approximation because how much time one gets through and how soon one is able to zoom out into the broader 1 meter level of awareness depends upon how soon one is able to grasp the totality of essential detail at the 0.1 meter level. And while one is looking at a smaller objective area, one also sees the detail of this area magnified by 10 times. So there is just as much "going on" at this level as at previous levels, and just as much subjective time at one's disposal to investigate what's going on.

You can see how neatly the time and distance scale together. At the 1 meter level, if one's investigation of reality can be symbolized by a strip of grass, then in 1 subjective-second of reality (1 second in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (1 objective meter) of the strip of grass.

At 0.1 meters: in 1 subjective-second of reality (0.1 seconds in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (0.1 objective meters) of the strip of grass. Hence, in 10 subjective seconds (1 second), one could investigate the essential details of 10 subjective-meters (1 objective meter). The same real-world time/area ratio as when one is normal. It just seems to take longer when one is on Salvia, and one gets to analyze that 1 meter strip of grass in more detail. Unfortunately, this intensified investigation of reality can only be used in conjunction with progressively narrower levels of awareness. It would be nice if one could analyze the concepts of "liberalism," or "photosynthesis" or whatnot with this intensified subjective duration and level of detail, but the more you intensify the level of detail and shrink the passage of time, the narrower the realm of awareness that one can access, by mechanical necessity, as it were. There seems to be a constant "rate" of experience that humans can access. If we could step outwards from our usual selves, where 1 subjective meter = 10 meters, where we are larger entities and looking out over the world with a broader perspective (and even greater ability for abstraction), by necessity we would only have 1/10th of the time to analyze things, and the details that we would be able to investigate would only be 1/10th as fine-grained.

At the 0.01 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down to the level of an ant crawling along the wire frame of the letter A. (The object could be different in each case, but the level of scale, I think, is consistent). Time effectively passes yet another 10 times more slowly, and one can notice 10 times the amount of detail on the wire frame (while losing awareness of the lawn and only being vaguely aware that this wire frame that one is investigating is part of a larger letter "A.") The sense of revelation that I often get from Salvia stems from me investigating, for example, this wire-frame level in enough of its essential details that I suddenly notice that its curves and twists form a larger letter "A." Suddenly I zoom out in quite literal physical terms, and my awareness likewise zooms out. I can then analyze the letter "A" and its immediate environs, and after a moment I'll discover that the letter "A" is just symbolizing one moment in a larger world that also includes much larger, broader things like college dorm buildings, lawns, world peace, liberalism, and other larger physical objects and abstract concepts. This is the experience I often get when coming down from the peak of Salvia. Whereas going up to the peak is like zooming in and in into a fractal, coming down from the peak is like zooming out and suddenly becoming aware of broader (but less detailed) levels of awareness. The physical substances/symbolisms can change (a letter "A," a "wheel," etc.), but the scale and traversing of this logarhythmic scale (and the resulting revelations upon zooming out to each next logarhythmic level) remain the same.

I found some fractal videos on youtube that sort of show what it's like. But it doesn't happen in the context of a made-up landscape of pretty colors, but rather with usually very ordinary and laughably prosaic objects, the idea for which one senses or appropriates from one's environment. And the effect of the zooming in and out does not apply to the visual sense alone, as in these videos, but rather to one's order of magnitude of conceptual awareness (breadth and detail being in inverse proportion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuyRCfhCZT0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRdLD6vh3g

Another good example would be the tidal pool stage of Spore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGHi0RqhOno
Whenever you eat food and grow bigger, and the camera zooms out, and the really big squid that seemed vague and murky in the background suddenly comes into your level of detail and awareness, that's what coming down off of Salvia is like, I guess.

What might a 0.001 meter level be like? I don't know, maybe a flea crawling around on the ant that's crawling around on the wire frame letter "A." At this level, you'd effectively be forced to spend 1000 times the amount of time to study stuff in 1000 times as much detail as normally. You would not be aware of the larger world, the letter "A," or even the texture and curves of the wire frame that made up the letter "A." One would only be aware of the geography of the ant that one was crawling around on.

One could easily imagine further levels. Being a bacterium on the flea. Being a molecule in the bacterium. Being an electron orbiting in a molecule. Imagine having to sepnd 1 million subjective seconds (just 1 second in the outside world) figuring out that this molecule of which one is aware is part of a larger assemblage of molecules in an organism. And imagine spending 100,000 subjective seconds at this level (1 second in real life) in order to figure out that this organism is feeding off a larger organism. And so on. One can see how mentally exhausting it could become, the constant revelations, the farther in you go. The real question is, is there a limit to how deep and narrow one's awareness can plunge???

Anyways, in terms of this night's experience, I didn't even make it fully down to the level of the letter "A." I was still aware of the letter "A" within the larger context of the lawn and the college dorm buildings and such. In a way, I think it was worthwhile to have a less powerful trip this time in order to not get so wrapped up in these deeper layers, so that I could get more of an eagle-eye view of things and verbalize it all in real time as I was witnessing it and figuring it all out (this time, I did not at any point lose my language capabilities, which shows that my awareness was still at a broad enough of a level to be aware of things like "time" and "distance" so that I could discuss them.) At one point I felt myself swooping down, or sort of getting my awareness sucked down to the level of the letter "A," but before I got there I gently drifted back up, and it was then that I knew for sure that I had just past the peak and that I could feel some relief that the experience was not going to be too intense this time.

Compare to: the last time, where I really did, at one point, get down to that ant-on-a-wire-frame level (although last time the objects were a smiling sun and a big 50ft. tall wall/box (or at least it momentarily seemed 50ft. tall, for the reasons I've just explained).

Now that I have some understanding of the general mechanics of my own Salvia trips, I do not have quite as much trepidation about doing it again. I just know that I have to be prepared for spending a million mental seconds investigating essential details of the universe at a much lower level of awareness (because, like I said, I get the (somewhat alarming) feeling when I am locked into the drug that zooming out back to the broader levels of awareness is contingent not just on the passive passage of time, but on me actively using that (dilated) time in order to *discover* each level's situatedness within a larger level, so that, for example, if I didn't bother to analyze whether the wire frame might be part of something bigger like a letter, I might never regain awareness of the wider world beyond that wire frame!)

When I do it next time, I'll also need to be prepared for possibly multiple revelations, depending on how far I go in and how many times I'll undergo that logarhythmic zooming-out as I discover how each successive layer of conceptual reality is nested within the one(s) beyond it.

I wish myself and all others goodluck in probing these deeper depths of awareness. And perhaps there is a way to break through, to achieve such a deep awareness that one senses one's self as simultaneously vanishingly miniscule/nothing, and yet the totality of all there is in the universe all at the same time, and suddenly perhaps one can gain a much braoder awareness when one punches through this threshhold. Perhaps we'll see....