First, in order to put what I'm about to say in an intellectual context, read this:
http://www.techgnosis.com/mindstates.html
For a while now, I've been flirting with the idea that the proper response to religious fundamentalism in the world today is not some self-assured secularism that is dismissive of "ecstatic states" or and the whole notion of an enchanted universe, as I used to think. More and more, I am coming to the conclusion that the answer is a culture of pluralistic mystery religions.
The modern application of the Greco-Roman mystery religion template would perhaps be characterized by three things:
1. The primacy of a direct communion with the divine—often with the aid of ancient psychedelic sacraments, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries#Entheogenic_theories
2. An organizational framework involving mentorships, apprenticeships, rites of induction, and other community practices to facilitate shared communion with the individually-experienced divine and to help integrate this divine experience into the rest of one's experience. Today's psychedelic youth culture could probably benefit immensely from access to such frameworks.
3. A non-exclusivity that allowed for one to be simultaneously a member of multiple mystery cults and/or the civic or imperial cult(s) as well. This would constitute a huge much-needed paradigm shift in religious practice away from the grasping, dominating, repressive, adherent-hoarding modus operandi of today's religious fundamentalism (which includes the dangerous, greedy modus operandi of Scientology, a modern mystery religion that gives the whole idea of mystery religions a horrible name).
What modern irreligion lacks is a sense of gravitas. In contrast, a key characteristic of these mystery religions would be their deadly seriousness—about fun, esoteric knowledge, and the fun of esoteric knowledge. Christianity has given us the funny idea that spirituality cannot be recreational, and that recreation cannot be spiritual. The mystery religion framework offers a rebuttal to this odd notion, which is why they might be the perfect template to potentially help us integrate our pluralism of psychedelic experiences into a shared communion—a communion that embraces the pluralistic individualism of the original experiences, the desire to connect these experiences with those of others within some dynamic, emergent mythology, and the prospect of combining so-called "recreational" psychedelic use with "spiritual" psychedelic use into one endeavor.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Salvia's Sneaky Sleight of Hand
Note: This was a trip that I had some time ago that I'm just now posting on my blog. I originally sent it in to erowid.org, so I'm hoping that it will get published there too.
==============
Taking salvia sublingually in a homemade tincture form was interesting and definitely seemed like something worthwhile to try at least once, even if you are usually skilled at the smoking method, because it offered a slow, relaxed investigation of the typology of the salvia experience--something that one cannot usually piece together when one is smoking salvia and having one's universe instantly obliterated and re-assembled. What one finds with the tincture method is that salvia can execute its reassembling of your reality in a very slow, subtle, and sneaky (and, as I found out, equally surprising) way as well. You might think that, with enough of a gradual experience, you can see salvia's tricks coming, but the funny thing is you can't.
This homemade tincture was composed of about ~1 oz. of plain (unextracted) dried leaf material that was ground into small sawdust-chip-sized (but not powder-fine) leaves with a hand-cranked nut grinder. This leaf material was then left in a dark place to ferment for about 5 days in a 200 ml-bottle of 151-proof Bacardi Rum (I had removed about a fourth of the original rum to make room for the leaf material, so we're talking about maybe 150 ml of rum mixed with the ounce of salvia leaf).
For this trip, I ended up using about a third of the resulting bottle of tincture, although some of that was spilled and dribbled out of my mouth a few times when I began gagging from how hot the alcohol was burning in my mouth (I learned that, even with 151-proof alcohol, diluting it a bit before serving is a MUST!), so I'd say the amount that I actively consumed was maybe around 1/4 of the bottle. This was over the course of about 30 minutes, with about 7 or 8 (I lost count) doses taken at about 4 minute intervals, held under the tongue, and then swallowed (I thought, "Why the hell not, don't want the alcohol to go to waste...") I didn't use an eye-dropper--I just basically poured some of the tincture into a paper cup and took tiny swigs of it--enough to fit under the tongue each time. My plan was to just take as much tincture as possible until I became too disoriented to dose myself any more. I suppose I succeeded eventually.
(And by the way, the "taste" actually wasn't that bad. It just tasted like rum with a slight hint of mint. In any case the "taste" was completely overpowered by the scorching heat of the alcohol on my tongue. And in case you are wondering what your batch should look like by the time it is ready, mine had a dark, dark green color of such neon-green hue that it reminded me of the water colors from those Easter egg coloring kits).
For about the first 15 minutes I felt nothing. Then I started to feel a little weird and spacey. By about the 6th dose (20 minutes in), my awareness was starting to be gently tugged along down interesting paths. Towards the end of holding the 6th dose under my tongue, when I would close or even just blink my eyes, I would start to see some vague shapes flit in and out of my mind's eye. These shapes at one point materialized, most memorably, into a parade of hot girls in bikini outfits that were floating towards me and past me on my left side--just floating through the air doing flips and whatnot, as if diving from horizontal high-diving platforms in zero gravity. Then I would open my eyes about halfway, and this sense would peek through into my open-eyed state, as if the girls were hiding in the wall and peeking out, or as if the conveyor belt or parade of them was coming up from the other side of the wall, and as they came through the wall, they would dissolve as if passing through a filter, just before entering my full open-eyed view. I thought that was pretty funny.
At about this time my friends got ready to leave to go see a movie. As they were saying a few last things to one another, I noticed that time seemed to be going at two slightly different rates depending on what I paid attention to. If I paid attention to my friends talking, time seemed to go on as normal. But if I paid attention to my own thought processes, time seemed to move much more slowly. And then my friends would speak, and I'd notice once again that time was not going any differently at all based on the rate of their speech passing by my awareness. But then I'd think about the spacey-ness that I was feeling, and time would seem to go a bit slowly again. It wasn't as if I thought it was going slowly because I had judged some activity whose normal duration I already knew as taking longer to play out. Rather, it was just a visceral, pre-deductive feeling.
As my friends were leaving, I took what was probably the 7th dose, which would prove to be the peak dose. I laid back, I felt the bed bob up and down as if it were floating on the ocean (sort of like a water-bed feeling, which is notable because my bed is about the stiffest, creakiest thing imaginable). At this point time definitely seemed to be going more slowly when focusing on my own thoughts or on the shapes in my mind's eye with my eyes closed, and I soon got into this mode of saying all of my thoughts to myself in my head repeatedly and repeatedly in echoing fashion. This was salvia's sneakiness starting to manifest itself because it wasn't like I was saying it once in my head and then hearing it echo in my head. It was like I was in this "mode" where it just felt good and natural to say all of my thoughts in my head in a flanging, echoing fashion. I felt like it wouldn't have been difficult to fight this impulse and say each word to myself in my head only once, but it would have been hard, I guess, and in the silence between one word and the time when I would think of the next word in the sentence, I'd be bound to get distracted from my train of thought, whereas saying the word over and over in my head sort of helped me constantly remind myself of my train of thought. So I went with it. In any case, it didn't really seem that out of the ordinary at the moment. I was thinking to myself (in echoing fashion): "Man, this salvia isn't really doing anything. This inclination to chant my thoughts is not all that extraordinary and would be quite possible to deal with in ordinary life." Once again, this was because I honestly felt like I was voluntarily echoing stuff over and over to myself and that I could willingly get out of this groove if I wanted to, and that it was really just an inclination to stick in this mental groove of operating like this, and not a shift in reality or anything interesting, that was making me do this. In fact, it felt like, in doing this, I was doing something that I normally do anyways when I'm feeling absent-minded, like whistling a tune that's stuck in one's head, and that the only shift was in it feeling slight more fitting or "groovy" to yield to this spacey, absent-minded impulse. I would only rediscover, upon coming down, that this chanting or echoing of my thoughts is not at all like my base state of consciousness, of course).
The next aspect of salvia's sneakiness came as I echoingly and non-chalantly continued this train of thought: "Yeah, this tincture method is pretty boring. I think I'm gonna leave this balcony and go do something else..." For now I was of the casual impression that I was standing on like a balcony of a parking garage-sort of building, or some apartment block with no walls and an open view on one side, and my room appeared as a large, far-away cityscape. The lamp off to my left seemed like a warm, golden afternoon sun. The thing about this building, though (and this didn't seem at all strange at the time), was that it was not like I was looking at it, but that I knew how it was laid out, how the two storeys and walls and roof were laid out, because I could feel the entire building. Because, in fact, the entire building was my mouth and head, with my jaw being the bottom floor, my tongue being the 2nd floor (on which I was standing), and my head on up from there being vaguely the "upper" floors that I could sense. I only figured out that the building was my mouth a few moments later, of course. But basically, this is how you would construct it:
*Take one normal size copy of me, and inflate to about 10x the size of normal me.
*Then take a normal size copy of me and place me on the tongue of the big-size me.
*Then wire the two nervous systems together so that the normal size-me can feel myself standing on my own tongue, the tongue of the big-size me.
*Now put the two versions of me together like a Klein bottle, without distinction between the "bigger" me and the "smaller" me, but still with the same self-looping topology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
Just as there is technically no "inner" or "outer" surface of a Klein bottle, so was there neither any "big me" or "small me," except I could still feel myself standing on my own tongue. Yeah, pretty weird...but I didn't quite realize what was going on yet. The salvia had somehow so slyly rearranged this aspect of my reality that I didn't originally notice that anything had changed.
So here I am, standing on my own tongue and gazing out into the cityscape of my room in what seems like the afternoon sunlight, and soon I feel some stuff that sort of feels like slick-wheeled carts rolling off the building ledge that I'm standing on and falling out of the building. The sensation that this stuff produced as it rolled to what was in fact the tip of my tongue was a sort of sensuous gratification. I ask myself, "What is this stuff rolling off the balcony? Ah, I feel that there's more of it sitting and gently rolling around in the corner of this room behind me." At this point I realize that this is the tincture, and that this apartment building that I'm standing in and feeling is actually my mouth. So I had enough sense at this point to swallow the rest of the tincture, thinking that the safest thing to do, lest I become confused about the nature of this stuff in my mouth once again and think it a neat idea to try sending these chairs rolling down the proverbial "hallway" into the proverbial "lung." Anyways, needless to say, the sensation of swallowing the rest of the tincture was...weird.
So then I went back to my echoing mental thought perusal, and I casually remarked to myself in this chanting inner monologue how well my chanting was sync-ing up with the chanting of the other presence in the room. This other presence's chanting manifested itself as a calm, constant, Buddhist-like vibrational hum of energy and light coming from my lower right. It seemed like a pleasant, grounding, perfectly familiar companion. At first I had the notion that, even though I was just now paying attention to it, this companion had been in the room, doing its thing, the whole time, and that I had even known this companion for a long time preceding immediate recollection. And in a sense I was correct because I soon realized that this pleasantly humming "companion" was the soft hissing of my laptop's power adapter (I have one of those adapters that makes a slight hissing sound that is barely noticeable, but with the room being as quiet as it was and with me spacing out like I was, I was bound to notice it once again). Needless to say, I felt pretty silly when I realized this.
Even after consciously remembering that it was my power adapter, I couldn't get away from this tension in the room that was starting to develop out of the hissing of the power adapter--this sort of feeling of expectation that I was being expected to be getting ready to "do something," so I decided to unplug my laptop to get some peace and quiet for the moment, as the usually-quiet power adapter was now deafeningly occupying all of my attention.
When I finally unplugged the power adapter and heard the hissing shut off, though, I felt kind of sad, now that I had silenced my "companion," and I tried to plug it back in, but I was still very clumsy at this point, and I dropped the cord behind a table leg, and I was so demoralized at the prospect of executing the complicated actions necessary to get the cord back around, that I just left it there and laid back in my bed, feeling a bit wistful now.
After that point, I began to come down. I took one more tincture dose under the tongue, but it only seemed to prolong the tapering-off just a bit. I spent the rest of the time listening to myself chant some thoughts, and when I got tired with that, I put on some music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1cfTMdjkYM
When I was watching this while coming down, I swore that I was discovering faces in the light shows that had been there all along, but now I'm not sure if I see them anymore. I guess not.
So, what did I learn in general about the way that salvia works its magic?
I got to see just how sneaky salvia is in working its magic. When you smoke a high dose of it, the incredible discontinuity of the rearrangement of one's reality is not just because it is coming on so fast. The shift in consciousness is just inherently elusive with salvia, it seems.
Going into this trip, part of me had this aspiration to put salvia into slow-motion so that I could continuously and consciously monitor every facet of my reality and sort of catch the salvia "in the act" of rearranging my reality. I sort of hoped that there would be a moment where I'd be able to say, "A ha! Gotcha! So THIS is how you go about rearranging my reality!" But like a true magician, salvia seems to work its magic by performing its sleight of hand where you are not looking, and if you then try to look there, it rearranges these bizarre alterations into your reality somewhere else, like a mischievous elf that is always rearranging the furniture in your room behind your back--while also simultaneously planting false memories or sensibilities in your mind that your room has always been this way, such that you don't notice that anything at all has changed...until you start to come back down and get to compare the disco parlor that your elf has transformed your room into with a photo that you are suddenly able to retrieve from your memory's filing cabinets of the former version of your room as a quiet Victorian study. This is how salvia's rearrangement of reality works, and the result is often hilarious.
==============
Taking salvia sublingually in a homemade tincture form was interesting and definitely seemed like something worthwhile to try at least once, even if you are usually skilled at the smoking method, because it offered a slow, relaxed investigation of the typology of the salvia experience--something that one cannot usually piece together when one is smoking salvia and having one's universe instantly obliterated and re-assembled. What one finds with the tincture method is that salvia can execute its reassembling of your reality in a very slow, subtle, and sneaky (and, as I found out, equally surprising) way as well. You might think that, with enough of a gradual experience, you can see salvia's tricks coming, but the funny thing is you can't.
This homemade tincture was composed of about ~1 oz. of plain (unextracted) dried leaf material that was ground into small sawdust-chip-sized (but not powder-fine) leaves with a hand-cranked nut grinder. This leaf material was then left in a dark place to ferment for about 5 days in a 200 ml-bottle of 151-proof Bacardi Rum (I had removed about a fourth of the original rum to make room for the leaf material, so we're talking about maybe 150 ml of rum mixed with the ounce of salvia leaf).
For this trip, I ended up using about a third of the resulting bottle of tincture, although some of that was spilled and dribbled out of my mouth a few times when I began gagging from how hot the alcohol was burning in my mouth (I learned that, even with 151-proof alcohol, diluting it a bit before serving is a MUST!), so I'd say the amount that I actively consumed was maybe around 1/4 of the bottle. This was over the course of about 30 minutes, with about 7 or 8 (I lost count) doses taken at about 4 minute intervals, held under the tongue, and then swallowed (I thought, "Why the hell not, don't want the alcohol to go to waste...") I didn't use an eye-dropper--I just basically poured some of the tincture into a paper cup and took tiny swigs of it--enough to fit under the tongue each time. My plan was to just take as much tincture as possible until I became too disoriented to dose myself any more. I suppose I succeeded eventually.
(And by the way, the "taste" actually wasn't that bad. It just tasted like rum with a slight hint of mint. In any case the "taste" was completely overpowered by the scorching heat of the alcohol on my tongue. And in case you are wondering what your batch should look like by the time it is ready, mine had a dark, dark green color of such neon-green hue that it reminded me of the water colors from those Easter egg coloring kits).
For about the first 15 minutes I felt nothing. Then I started to feel a little weird and spacey. By about the 6th dose (20 minutes in), my awareness was starting to be gently tugged along down interesting paths. Towards the end of holding the 6th dose under my tongue, when I would close or even just blink my eyes, I would start to see some vague shapes flit in and out of my mind's eye. These shapes at one point materialized, most memorably, into a parade of hot girls in bikini outfits that were floating towards me and past me on my left side--just floating through the air doing flips and whatnot, as if diving from horizontal high-diving platforms in zero gravity. Then I would open my eyes about halfway, and this sense would peek through into my open-eyed state, as if the girls were hiding in the wall and peeking out, or as if the conveyor belt or parade of them was coming up from the other side of the wall, and as they came through the wall, they would dissolve as if passing through a filter, just before entering my full open-eyed view. I thought that was pretty funny.
At about this time my friends got ready to leave to go see a movie. As they were saying a few last things to one another, I noticed that time seemed to be going at two slightly different rates depending on what I paid attention to. If I paid attention to my friends talking, time seemed to go on as normal. But if I paid attention to my own thought processes, time seemed to move much more slowly. And then my friends would speak, and I'd notice once again that time was not going any differently at all based on the rate of their speech passing by my awareness. But then I'd think about the spacey-ness that I was feeling, and time would seem to go a bit slowly again. It wasn't as if I thought it was going slowly because I had judged some activity whose normal duration I already knew as taking longer to play out. Rather, it was just a visceral, pre-deductive feeling.
As my friends were leaving, I took what was probably the 7th dose, which would prove to be the peak dose. I laid back, I felt the bed bob up and down as if it were floating on the ocean (sort of like a water-bed feeling, which is notable because my bed is about the stiffest, creakiest thing imaginable). At this point time definitely seemed to be going more slowly when focusing on my own thoughts or on the shapes in my mind's eye with my eyes closed, and I soon got into this mode of saying all of my thoughts to myself in my head repeatedly and repeatedly in echoing fashion. This was salvia's sneakiness starting to manifest itself because it wasn't like I was saying it once in my head and then hearing it echo in my head. It was like I was in this "mode" where it just felt good and natural to say all of my thoughts in my head in a flanging, echoing fashion. I felt like it wouldn't have been difficult to fight this impulse and say each word to myself in my head only once, but it would have been hard, I guess, and in the silence between one word and the time when I would think of the next word in the sentence, I'd be bound to get distracted from my train of thought, whereas saying the word over and over in my head sort of helped me constantly remind myself of my train of thought. So I went with it. In any case, it didn't really seem that out of the ordinary at the moment. I was thinking to myself (in echoing fashion): "Man, this salvia isn't really doing anything. This inclination to chant my thoughts is not all that extraordinary and would be quite possible to deal with in ordinary life." Once again, this was because I honestly felt like I was voluntarily echoing stuff over and over to myself and that I could willingly get out of this groove if I wanted to, and that it was really just an inclination to stick in this mental groove of operating like this, and not a shift in reality or anything interesting, that was making me do this. In fact, it felt like, in doing this, I was doing something that I normally do anyways when I'm feeling absent-minded, like whistling a tune that's stuck in one's head, and that the only shift was in it feeling slight more fitting or "groovy" to yield to this spacey, absent-minded impulse. I would only rediscover, upon coming down, that this chanting or echoing of my thoughts is not at all like my base state of consciousness, of course).
The next aspect of salvia's sneakiness came as I echoingly and non-chalantly continued this train of thought: "Yeah, this tincture method is pretty boring. I think I'm gonna leave this balcony and go do something else..." For now I was of the casual impression that I was standing on like a balcony of a parking garage-sort of building, or some apartment block with no walls and an open view on one side, and my room appeared as a large, far-away cityscape. The lamp off to my left seemed like a warm, golden afternoon sun. The thing about this building, though (and this didn't seem at all strange at the time), was that it was not like I was looking at it, but that I knew how it was laid out, how the two storeys and walls and roof were laid out, because I could feel the entire building. Because, in fact, the entire building was my mouth and head, with my jaw being the bottom floor, my tongue being the 2nd floor (on which I was standing), and my head on up from there being vaguely the "upper" floors that I could sense. I only figured out that the building was my mouth a few moments later, of course. But basically, this is how you would construct it:
*Take one normal size copy of me, and inflate to about 10x the size of normal me.
*Then take a normal size copy of me and place me on the tongue of the big-size me.
*Then wire the two nervous systems together so that the normal size-me can feel myself standing on my own tongue, the tongue of the big-size me.
*Now put the two versions of me together like a Klein bottle, without distinction between the "bigger" me and the "smaller" me, but still with the same self-looping topology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
Just as there is technically no "inner" or "outer" surface of a Klein bottle, so was there neither any "big me" or "small me," except I could still feel myself standing on my own tongue. Yeah, pretty weird...but I didn't quite realize what was going on yet. The salvia had somehow so slyly rearranged this aspect of my reality that I didn't originally notice that anything had changed.
So here I am, standing on my own tongue and gazing out into the cityscape of my room in what seems like the afternoon sunlight, and soon I feel some stuff that sort of feels like slick-wheeled carts rolling off the building ledge that I'm standing on and falling out of the building. The sensation that this stuff produced as it rolled to what was in fact the tip of my tongue was a sort of sensuous gratification. I ask myself, "What is this stuff rolling off the balcony? Ah, I feel that there's more of it sitting and gently rolling around in the corner of this room behind me." At this point I realize that this is the tincture, and that this apartment building that I'm standing in and feeling is actually my mouth. So I had enough sense at this point to swallow the rest of the tincture, thinking that the safest thing to do, lest I become confused about the nature of this stuff in my mouth once again and think it a neat idea to try sending these chairs rolling down the proverbial "hallway" into the proverbial "lung." Anyways, needless to say, the sensation of swallowing the rest of the tincture was...weird.
So then I went back to my echoing mental thought perusal, and I casually remarked to myself in this chanting inner monologue how well my chanting was sync-ing up with the chanting of the other presence in the room. This other presence's chanting manifested itself as a calm, constant, Buddhist-like vibrational hum of energy and light coming from my lower right. It seemed like a pleasant, grounding, perfectly familiar companion. At first I had the notion that, even though I was just now paying attention to it, this companion had been in the room, doing its thing, the whole time, and that I had even known this companion for a long time preceding immediate recollection. And in a sense I was correct because I soon realized that this pleasantly humming "companion" was the soft hissing of my laptop's power adapter (I have one of those adapters that makes a slight hissing sound that is barely noticeable, but with the room being as quiet as it was and with me spacing out like I was, I was bound to notice it once again). Needless to say, I felt pretty silly when I realized this.
Even after consciously remembering that it was my power adapter, I couldn't get away from this tension in the room that was starting to develop out of the hissing of the power adapter--this sort of feeling of expectation that I was being expected to be getting ready to "do something," so I decided to unplug my laptop to get some peace and quiet for the moment, as the usually-quiet power adapter was now deafeningly occupying all of my attention.
When I finally unplugged the power adapter and heard the hissing shut off, though, I felt kind of sad, now that I had silenced my "companion," and I tried to plug it back in, but I was still very clumsy at this point, and I dropped the cord behind a table leg, and I was so demoralized at the prospect of executing the complicated actions necessary to get the cord back around, that I just left it there and laid back in my bed, feeling a bit wistful now.
After that point, I began to come down. I took one more tincture dose under the tongue, but it only seemed to prolong the tapering-off just a bit. I spent the rest of the time listening to myself chant some thoughts, and when I got tired with that, I put on some music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1cfTMdjkYM
When I was watching this while coming down, I swore that I was discovering faces in the light shows that had been there all along, but now I'm not sure if I see them anymore. I guess not.
So, what did I learn in general about the way that salvia works its magic?
I got to see just how sneaky salvia is in working its magic. When you smoke a high dose of it, the incredible discontinuity of the rearrangement of one's reality is not just because it is coming on so fast. The shift in consciousness is just inherently elusive with salvia, it seems.
Going into this trip, part of me had this aspiration to put salvia into slow-motion so that I could continuously and consciously monitor every facet of my reality and sort of catch the salvia "in the act" of rearranging my reality. I sort of hoped that there would be a moment where I'd be able to say, "A ha! Gotcha! So THIS is how you go about rearranging my reality!" But like a true magician, salvia seems to work its magic by performing its sleight of hand where you are not looking, and if you then try to look there, it rearranges these bizarre alterations into your reality somewhere else, like a mischievous elf that is always rearranging the furniture in your room behind your back--while also simultaneously planting false memories or sensibilities in your mind that your room has always been this way, such that you don't notice that anything at all has changed...until you start to come back down and get to compare the disco parlor that your elf has transformed your room into with a photo that you are suddenly able to retrieve from your memory's filing cabinets of the former version of your room as a quiet Victorian study. This is how salvia's rearrangement of reality works, and the result is often hilarious.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Going waaaaaaaay out there with salvia -- experiencing higher dimensions and alternate universes of myself???
This salvia experience began with an intention to determine the amount of plain salvia leaf that would have to be smoked in order to achieve any effect. The reason is that I have a whopping 3 ounces of this plain salvia leaf, and I am not sure whether I want to use the rest of it for making an alcohol tincture, as originally planned, or whether it would be more effective to just smoke it (because I found with a smaller test batch that the tincture method, while it does work to some extent, requires a lot of patience and isn't capable of propelling one as far, and with the more gradual nature of the tincture method, salvia is still just as maddeningly elusive as ever). I went outside by myself around 4am to do this test, and I must have smoked about 8 bowls in about 4 minutes, at which point my lungs felt about as wore out as I felt prudent or acceptable to subject them to, and at which point I was only getting the mildest flirtings with the weirdness of salvia, such that I would not have even probably noticed any changed had I not known what signs to look for as harbingers of the state into which salvia normally leads when smoked in sufficiently potent extract form. Furthermore, with the last 2 or 3 bowls, I did not feel myself getting any higher, so I concluded that even with lungs of steel that would allow one to smoke 20 bowls in a row, one would still necessarily have to do that over a 10-minute stretch, in which time the effect from the first 10 bowls would have already worn off. So I concluded that I guess I will go ahead and use the rest of the plain leaf for making a larger batch of tincture.
My curiosity, as usual, though, was seized by the flirtation with weirdness that usually comes with an insufficiently strong salvia dose. Furthermore, I felt that I was on the verge of being able to explain the phenomenology of the initial transition into the experience, which is a major, if often elusive, goal of mine. But I needed just a little bit more "raw experience" to pin it down.
So I went back inside, packed a bowl of 20x extract, and went back outside. I took two hits of the 20x extract, pretty much finishing the entire bowl. I wasn't particularly confident that it would do much because I have read that tolerance to salvia develops quickly (but also fades just as quickly--I have taken it for 3 days in a row at 24-hour intervals and have experienced virtually no attenuation of effect--if anything, a reverse tolerance or priming, in fact!), so I was not sure whether my body was already on standby alert for metabolizing incoming Salvinorin A diterpinoid molecules from when I had smoked the 8 or so bowls of plain salvia leaf just 5 minutes beforehand.
This trip started out along a similar schema that structures many of my trips (but which I feel I am only satisfactorily explaining now):
You take a mental snapshot of a present situation as you are, going into the trip (usually my mental image of my situation is something like me in my boots and trench coat, holding a pipe in some benign self-directed experiment in some harmless context), and you are led to situate that mental image within a 3-D geometrical grid as a base starting point. So that mental image of one's situation becomes a 3-D mental object that can be rotated, traced along its edges, etc. Often the salvia ends up leading me to trace this image along its edges, and often I go deeper by finding the edge to not be a line-like dimension, but rather to be like a wire or folded piece of paper that an ant can crawl around (with embedded dimensions, like in string theory)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o
...and this transition to a higher dimensional reality I take to be the zooming back in to the real reality, the coming down from salvia (if I even remember at all having taken it a moment ago), even as in reality I'm coming up. But it's difficult to figure out while you are going along which way you are going, and in which direction lies reality and in which lies illusion. No, in fact, the sensation is not one of difficulty at all--one is immediately convinced, with the same obviousness of looking around at life normally and feeling sure that "Now I am not dreaming" or "Now I am conscious" or "Now this is reality," that your entering into this alternate reality is the real reality.
If the trip goes deeper, then this new appraisal of the situation of the universe being this wire becomes objectified in 3 dimensions, and as I trace one of the edges of this 3-D object, then once again I will find it to be a wire with nested dimensions, and I will become convinced that I have FINALLY come back to the real reality, and I'll think back and remember that I have just traversed two levels of illusory reality and think to myself, "Well, whatever just happened to me to propel me through what I've just experienced, it sure must have been strong to have this whole long dreamlike delirium of a life that existed at not one, but two levels of geometrical abstraction removed from ordinary reality! But now I'm back..." Ha!
Anyways, in this instance, I had the initial 3-D objectification of my mental image of my present situation, but instead of following one of the edges of this 3-D object and finding some nested, fractal-like layer of complexity within it, the 3-D mental image seemed to plant itself on a small globe. This globe was maybe 15 feet in diameter, and was cartoon-like, black, with a black surrounding ether, such that I could only tell that it was a globe by how the 3-D object planted on it (my mental image) slid away from my view as the globe started to rotate forward under my feet (I was sort of distinct from the globe, floating above it and just watching it roll forward below me).
First the globe rolled about 45 degrees, such that I could still see the 3-D mental image of my original situation, but the angles on it obviously looked different. But nothing else was really different, and I remember thinking, "Okay, we've gone this far, this is nothing big, I can still see my real situation, even if it is off in the distance." I had one trip with Suraj where I went precisely to this spot, and no further, and at the time I described it like a gentle zooming-in to a higher magnitude of detail, but then gently lifting back up before one got absorbed into the higher magnitude of detail, such that one simply felt the mechanics of what was going to happen.
This time, however, I proceeded past this familiar point, and the surface plane of the globe that was doing its geometrical rotations on my 3-D mental images was revealed to be a subset surface of something much larger and higher-dimensional. And as I ascended into this higher dimension, I lost sight of the 3-D image of my starting situation, and with the situation no longer in sight, I lost all memory or contact with it. It was as if memory was operating as items that one sees in 3-dimensional space, and one remembers an item (a situation, a person's name, a word, etc.) by physically seeing it sitting there. And so one's ability to remember something is contingent upon something as simple as looking around you and determining what you can see.
Anyways, as I lost sight of my starting situation, I knew that things were "getting serious" in some way, and I asked myself, "Well, exactly how serious is this?" And immediately the answer, as if pre-programmed into my psychological preparation for these trips, shot back, "Not serious at all. You just smoked some Salvia. You'll be fine in a few minutes." And I felt some momentary relief. But then I began to see that this higher-dimensional shape was a blade of grass, and what I had been mistaking for that sphere plane had been the surface of a blade of grass, and I found myself reinterpreting, as if some "Oh duh!" thought were dawning on me, the physical geometry in front of me as the ground of a soccer field as my head lay on it on its side. And suddenly I "remembered," "Oh yeah, it's "only" Salvia...except you must have just taken it at one of your soccer games, you dipshit, and now everyone is standing around you, worried about your health, and you are going to get into major trouble!" And I had the same feeling that one would have if the police were to find a pound of heroin in your car, that "Ohhhhh, fuck..." demoralization and resignation to a subsequent rest of your life in prison or something (because I guess I had the sense in this universe that this salvia experience was illegal and/or so embarrassing that my life would never recover from it, that I would never live it down. Because at that moment I was sure, as without question or seeing any need to question as much as one is normally about one's reality after waking up from a dream, that all that I had experienced before, my whole life as "Matthew," had been just a very elaborate salvia trip that I was just now coming out of. Instead I had the sense that I was, I guess, what seemed like this high school kid in some suburban community who was playing soccer in front of his (entirely different set of) school friends and parents. That's why, just as I was in fact coming up on the peak of the drug, I thought that finally then I was coming back down. And this reality seemed as vivid and real as any "reality" in our "real" world. It is amazing how quickly it comes together, fully-formed, and one realizes afterward that all of these "senses" (of having a certain life with certain parents and certain acquaintances, living in a certain time and place) are constantly operating in one's mind at a barely subconscious level and and structuring one's awareness. That is how it works in the salvia world as well. There are no moments taken to assimilate this change of reality, to pause and think, "Oh, I have this name with this life that includes this father, this mother, in this town and year, where I do these things." Instead, one has a fully-formed alternate life history that doesn't even need to be consciously remarked upon or accessed in order to have its effect.
And I find it somewhat funny and demonstrative that, despite the fact that I was able to hold onto what should have been a reassuring thought that I had only just smoked salvia, as I kept my eye on this thought, I necessarily had to take my eye off of everything else, and all the rest slipped away and was replaced. Well, the thought that "I have just smoked salvia" is of no reassurance at all if it suddenly takes place within a context that makes it illegal or otherwise problematic. In such ways I continue to find that there is no surefire way to prepare for a salvia trip because there is only so much mental reassurance (if anything) that you can take with you to the other side to put you at ease there, and what you have taken with you might have become meaningless or worse in the new context by the time you have arrived in this new context.
After that point with the feeling of the people standing around me on the soccer field and me feeling really guilty and demoralized and unsettled, my recollection of the trip becomes a little bit hazy because ever since the end of the trip I have been focusing on trying to recount the trip from beginning to end, and naturally the beginning then became a bit more solidified into my recollection, which is fortunate because it is usually the missing step, and to see exactly how ordinary reality devolves into the salvia experience is the most interesting, yet often elusive finding.
But, roughly speaking, I can say that I then determined that this supposed life as the boy playing soccer was just an illusion, and I think at one point I questioned whether the salvia explanation for my predicament itself might even be an illusion. But after a few confusing minutes I came back to reality. Once again the sense of being surrounded by presences persisted, except when I remembered who I was and that I was at Harvard, I reinterpreted the people who I thought had been standing around me on the soccer field earlier as, "Oh, these just must be Harvard people standing around me." I was ever sure at one point that I looked up over my right shoulder and saw something standing over me and seeming to inquire, with their body language, what was happening to me, and I looked down to try to find my pipe to gesture to them with it, and when I looked back a few moments later (because searching for my pipe then led me into getting distracted down other trains of thought), there was no person there. I'm still not really sure if maybe someone walked by at one point and looked down at me and then left, or what, but I suspect not. But the reason I doubt is, it seemed to some extent that I was REALLY coming back at this point, such that I even remember having the stone railing and the bushes that are really there in my field of view as I looked up at the person. But then again, salvia is rife with these "false awakening" experiences as one is coming down, much like waking up within a dream.
I would very much describe this as like where one is in a dream and suddenly remembers or realizes that there is this alternate reality out there. With salvia I usually stay aware that there are these multiple realities. But in a dream where I become lucid to the fact that I have this alternate reality, I immediately recognize that as "real life" and my present circumstance as a dream. This happens usually at a very intuitive, automatic level, although sometimes it happens pretty quickly as I do something to test reality, by trying to read a book or flip a light switch on and off or look at a clock. To imagine a salvia trip, the exercise would be to take that dream at the moment that you realize or remember that there is another reality out there, but interject, at the very least, some doubt as to which reality is the real world and which one the dream world, and often I would say salvia goes farther in giving you an intuitive gut feeling that this new reality is your waking up into or coming back to the real reality, and your previous reality was some dream/hallucinogenic/otherwise illusory state. And unlike in a lucid dream where you can tell it is not reality by things behaving oddly, in the salvia world things seem to work perfectly as "you" (as you are in your new identity in that world) would expect them to work. It all seems perfectly normal and unquestionably self-evident that you have come back to the real reality.
That is why I really no longer trust the test of saying to yourself, "Now I am conscious", or "Now I am not dreaming", as any proof that our ordinary world is not a dream world. Because if it were a dream world, the fact has been demonstrated to me firsthand now that it could or would feel just as real as a real world.
An additional note: From the moment where one's mental image of one's present situation becomes 3-dimensionally objectified in one's mind's eye, one's open-eye vision and mind's eye vision become fused together. You seem to physically see what is in your mind's eye, and what is in your mind's eye is often acted upon by what your physical eyes are looking at. It is a very curious thing, and really a testament to the amazing fact that the mind normally manages, improbably, to keep these things distinct at all. It makes one really appreciate the complexity and efficacious subtlety of the human brain.
Another additional note: More and more after this most recent trip, and after watching some of these youtube videos about imagining higher dimensions, I have started to speculate that what I originally interpreted as encountering other spirits inhabiting my same life experience might simply have been my experience of stepping outside of time and seeing the different states of myself in time simultaneously as if I were looking at time as just another spatial dimension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDajcGcKiAM
Likewise, the situating of my 3-D mental images on a 2-D spherical plane that itself has a higher 3-D reality (which would effectively be 4-D from the standpoint of the original 3-D mental image) could be understood as stepping into a higher dimension reality and looking back on this reality from a higher dimension.
And one could possibly even look at the alternate lives or identities that I seemed to experience as alternate worldlines of myself in higher dimensions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
If the 4th dimension encompasses one particular line of all of my lifetime states in a particular instant, as it were (seeing my whole life spatially laid out before me), then the 5th dimension would encompass the many possible probabilistic lines of my lifetime states (the many possible lives that I could live depending on the outcomes of innumerable quantum probabilities from this point onward) in the same plane that intersect with, and stem out from, the line that I am normally experiencing. And the 6th dimension would be like a 3-dimensional space for these world lines of myself to traverse, which would be able to include world lines of myself that never at any point intersected with the worldline that I am now living. So the 5th dimension would include the world-line in the same plane of me becoming a multi-millionaire 30 years from now, and the 6th dimension would include the worldline of me as an alien on the planet Zytran, or me as some kid with his face laying on the ground in some soccer field with people standing around him in a universe where salvia is illegal. Now, like the flatlanders who are constrained to moving in 2 dimensions and who wouldn't even see the degrees of freedom of the higher dimensions, we are constrained to moving in 3 dimensions and can't really visualize the degree of freedom of moving through a deterministic timeline of our life (4th dimension), moving through the many universes of time intersecting with, or probabilistically branching out from, our current state (5th dimension) (so every lifetime that includes this moment of me as I am know, even if the rest of my life in the past or future is different in these other universes--meaning, even if I got to this point differently or departed from this point differently with different random probabilities determining my actions and the actions of the physical universe shaping my behavior), or moving through the many universes of time not even necessarily constrained to intersecting in any way with our current state (6th dimension...which, if I could move in the 6th dimension, I could move to the point in 6th dimensional space where I was a jellyfish swimming in the sea of the planet Vortron). Assuming, for a moment, that salvia allowed one to suddenly interact with stuff from higher dimensions (such as alternate selves as other human persons or even objects), one would perceive these phenomena as, like the balloon to the flatlander, popping in and out of existence non-causally (as far as we could tell...because the causes would be operating along dimensions that we wouldn't be seeing, such as the person pushing the balloon through the flatlander's plane, which the flatlander would never see). And that is at least consistent with the way that salvia, as well as other psychedelic drugs and supernatural phenomena in general, appear to us, so we cannot rule out that, when we are perceiving phenomena that seem outside of the causal laws of our 3-D space, that these phenomena are still subject to causes, but just causes in higher dimensions that we can't perceive. One could understand "God," in this sense, as simply the collection of higher-dimensional causes that seem to produce inexplicable effects on us mere 3-D beings.
My curiosity, as usual, though, was seized by the flirtation with weirdness that usually comes with an insufficiently strong salvia dose. Furthermore, I felt that I was on the verge of being able to explain the phenomenology of the initial transition into the experience, which is a major, if often elusive, goal of mine. But I needed just a little bit more "raw experience" to pin it down.
So I went back inside, packed a bowl of 20x extract, and went back outside. I took two hits of the 20x extract, pretty much finishing the entire bowl. I wasn't particularly confident that it would do much because I have read that tolerance to salvia develops quickly (but also fades just as quickly--I have taken it for 3 days in a row at 24-hour intervals and have experienced virtually no attenuation of effect--if anything, a reverse tolerance or priming, in fact!), so I was not sure whether my body was already on standby alert for metabolizing incoming Salvinorin A diterpinoid molecules from when I had smoked the 8 or so bowls of plain salvia leaf just 5 minutes beforehand.
This trip started out along a similar schema that structures many of my trips (but which I feel I am only satisfactorily explaining now):
You take a mental snapshot of a present situation as you are, going into the trip (usually my mental image of my situation is something like me in my boots and trench coat, holding a pipe in some benign self-directed experiment in some harmless context), and you are led to situate that mental image within a 3-D geometrical grid as a base starting point. So that mental image of one's situation becomes a 3-D mental object that can be rotated, traced along its edges, etc. Often the salvia ends up leading me to trace this image along its edges, and often I go deeper by finding the edge to not be a line-like dimension, but rather to be like a wire or folded piece of paper that an ant can crawl around (with embedded dimensions, like in string theory)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o
...and this transition to a higher dimensional reality I take to be the zooming back in to the real reality, the coming down from salvia (if I even remember at all having taken it a moment ago), even as in reality I'm coming up. But it's difficult to figure out while you are going along which way you are going, and in which direction lies reality and in which lies illusion. No, in fact, the sensation is not one of difficulty at all--one is immediately convinced, with the same obviousness of looking around at life normally and feeling sure that "Now I am not dreaming" or "Now I am conscious" or "Now this is reality," that your entering into this alternate reality is the real reality.
If the trip goes deeper, then this new appraisal of the situation of the universe being this wire becomes objectified in 3 dimensions, and as I trace one of the edges of this 3-D object, then once again I will find it to be a wire with nested dimensions, and I will become convinced that I have FINALLY come back to the real reality, and I'll think back and remember that I have just traversed two levels of illusory reality and think to myself, "Well, whatever just happened to me to propel me through what I've just experienced, it sure must have been strong to have this whole long dreamlike delirium of a life that existed at not one, but two levels of geometrical abstraction removed from ordinary reality! But now I'm back..." Ha!
Anyways, in this instance, I had the initial 3-D objectification of my mental image of my present situation, but instead of following one of the edges of this 3-D object and finding some nested, fractal-like layer of complexity within it, the 3-D mental image seemed to plant itself on a small globe. This globe was maybe 15 feet in diameter, and was cartoon-like, black, with a black surrounding ether, such that I could only tell that it was a globe by how the 3-D object planted on it (my mental image) slid away from my view as the globe started to rotate forward under my feet (I was sort of distinct from the globe, floating above it and just watching it roll forward below me).
First the globe rolled about 45 degrees, such that I could still see the 3-D mental image of my original situation, but the angles on it obviously looked different. But nothing else was really different, and I remember thinking, "Okay, we've gone this far, this is nothing big, I can still see my real situation, even if it is off in the distance." I had one trip with Suraj where I went precisely to this spot, and no further, and at the time I described it like a gentle zooming-in to a higher magnitude of detail, but then gently lifting back up before one got absorbed into the higher magnitude of detail, such that one simply felt the mechanics of what was going to happen.
This time, however, I proceeded past this familiar point, and the surface plane of the globe that was doing its geometrical rotations on my 3-D mental images was revealed to be a subset surface of something much larger and higher-dimensional. And as I ascended into this higher dimension, I lost sight of the 3-D image of my starting situation, and with the situation no longer in sight, I lost all memory or contact with it. It was as if memory was operating as items that one sees in 3-dimensional space, and one remembers an item (a situation, a person's name, a word, etc.) by physically seeing it sitting there. And so one's ability to remember something is contingent upon something as simple as looking around you and determining what you can see.
Anyways, as I lost sight of my starting situation, I knew that things were "getting serious" in some way, and I asked myself, "Well, exactly how serious is this?" And immediately the answer, as if pre-programmed into my psychological preparation for these trips, shot back, "Not serious at all. You just smoked some Salvia. You'll be fine in a few minutes." And I felt some momentary relief. But then I began to see that this higher-dimensional shape was a blade of grass, and what I had been mistaking for that sphere plane had been the surface of a blade of grass, and I found myself reinterpreting, as if some "Oh duh!" thought were dawning on me, the physical geometry in front of me as the ground of a soccer field as my head lay on it on its side. And suddenly I "remembered," "Oh yeah, it's "only" Salvia...except you must have just taken it at one of your soccer games, you dipshit, and now everyone is standing around you, worried about your health, and you are going to get into major trouble!" And I had the same feeling that one would have if the police were to find a pound of heroin in your car, that "Ohhhhh, fuck..." demoralization and resignation to a subsequent rest of your life in prison or something (because I guess I had the sense in this universe that this salvia experience was illegal and/or so embarrassing that my life would never recover from it, that I would never live it down. Because at that moment I was sure, as without question or seeing any need to question as much as one is normally about one's reality after waking up from a dream, that all that I had experienced before, my whole life as "Matthew," had been just a very elaborate salvia trip that I was just now coming out of. Instead I had the sense that I was, I guess, what seemed like this high school kid in some suburban community who was playing soccer in front of his (entirely different set of) school friends and parents. That's why, just as I was in fact coming up on the peak of the drug, I thought that finally then I was coming back down. And this reality seemed as vivid and real as any "reality" in our "real" world. It is amazing how quickly it comes together, fully-formed, and one realizes afterward that all of these "senses" (of having a certain life with certain parents and certain acquaintances, living in a certain time and place) are constantly operating in one's mind at a barely subconscious level and and structuring one's awareness. That is how it works in the salvia world as well. There are no moments taken to assimilate this change of reality, to pause and think, "Oh, I have this name with this life that includes this father, this mother, in this town and year, where I do these things." Instead, one has a fully-formed alternate life history that doesn't even need to be consciously remarked upon or accessed in order to have its effect.
And I find it somewhat funny and demonstrative that, despite the fact that I was able to hold onto what should have been a reassuring thought that I had only just smoked salvia, as I kept my eye on this thought, I necessarily had to take my eye off of everything else, and all the rest slipped away and was replaced. Well, the thought that "I have just smoked salvia" is of no reassurance at all if it suddenly takes place within a context that makes it illegal or otherwise problematic. In such ways I continue to find that there is no surefire way to prepare for a salvia trip because there is only so much mental reassurance (if anything) that you can take with you to the other side to put you at ease there, and what you have taken with you might have become meaningless or worse in the new context by the time you have arrived in this new context.
After that point with the feeling of the people standing around me on the soccer field and me feeling really guilty and demoralized and unsettled, my recollection of the trip becomes a little bit hazy because ever since the end of the trip I have been focusing on trying to recount the trip from beginning to end, and naturally the beginning then became a bit more solidified into my recollection, which is fortunate because it is usually the missing step, and to see exactly how ordinary reality devolves into the salvia experience is the most interesting, yet often elusive finding.
But, roughly speaking, I can say that I then determined that this supposed life as the boy playing soccer was just an illusion, and I think at one point I questioned whether the salvia explanation for my predicament itself might even be an illusion. But after a few confusing minutes I came back to reality. Once again the sense of being surrounded by presences persisted, except when I remembered who I was and that I was at Harvard, I reinterpreted the people who I thought had been standing around me on the soccer field earlier as, "Oh, these just must be Harvard people standing around me." I was ever sure at one point that I looked up over my right shoulder and saw something standing over me and seeming to inquire, with their body language, what was happening to me, and I looked down to try to find my pipe to gesture to them with it, and when I looked back a few moments later (because searching for my pipe then led me into getting distracted down other trains of thought), there was no person there. I'm still not really sure if maybe someone walked by at one point and looked down at me and then left, or what, but I suspect not. But the reason I doubt is, it seemed to some extent that I was REALLY coming back at this point, such that I even remember having the stone railing and the bushes that are really there in my field of view as I looked up at the person. But then again, salvia is rife with these "false awakening" experiences as one is coming down, much like waking up within a dream.
I would very much describe this as like where one is in a dream and suddenly remembers or realizes that there is this alternate reality out there. With salvia I usually stay aware that there are these multiple realities. But in a dream where I become lucid to the fact that I have this alternate reality, I immediately recognize that as "real life" and my present circumstance as a dream. This happens usually at a very intuitive, automatic level, although sometimes it happens pretty quickly as I do something to test reality, by trying to read a book or flip a light switch on and off or look at a clock. To imagine a salvia trip, the exercise would be to take that dream at the moment that you realize or remember that there is another reality out there, but interject, at the very least, some doubt as to which reality is the real world and which one the dream world, and often I would say salvia goes farther in giving you an intuitive gut feeling that this new reality is your waking up into or coming back to the real reality, and your previous reality was some dream/hallucinogenic/otherwise illusory state. And unlike in a lucid dream where you can tell it is not reality by things behaving oddly, in the salvia world things seem to work perfectly as "you" (as you are in your new identity in that world) would expect them to work. It all seems perfectly normal and unquestionably self-evident that you have come back to the real reality.
That is why I really no longer trust the test of saying to yourself, "Now I am conscious", or "Now I am not dreaming", as any proof that our ordinary world is not a dream world. Because if it were a dream world, the fact has been demonstrated to me firsthand now that it could or would feel just as real as a real world.
An additional note: From the moment where one's mental image of one's present situation becomes 3-dimensionally objectified in one's mind's eye, one's open-eye vision and mind's eye vision become fused together. You seem to physically see what is in your mind's eye, and what is in your mind's eye is often acted upon by what your physical eyes are looking at. It is a very curious thing, and really a testament to the amazing fact that the mind normally manages, improbably, to keep these things distinct at all. It makes one really appreciate the complexity and efficacious subtlety of the human brain.
Another additional note: More and more after this most recent trip, and after watching some of these youtube videos about imagining higher dimensions, I have started to speculate that what I originally interpreted as encountering other spirits inhabiting my same life experience might simply have been my experience of stepping outside of time and seeing the different states of myself in time simultaneously as if I were looking at time as just another spatial dimension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDajcGcKiAM
Likewise, the situating of my 3-D mental images on a 2-D spherical plane that itself has a higher 3-D reality (which would effectively be 4-D from the standpoint of the original 3-D mental image) could be understood as stepping into a higher dimension reality and looking back on this reality from a higher dimension.
And one could possibly even look at the alternate lives or identities that I seemed to experience as alternate worldlines of myself in higher dimensions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
If the 4th dimension encompasses one particular line of all of my lifetime states in a particular instant, as it were (seeing my whole life spatially laid out before me), then the 5th dimension would encompass the many possible probabilistic lines of my lifetime states (the many possible lives that I could live depending on the outcomes of innumerable quantum probabilities from this point onward) in the same plane that intersect with, and stem out from, the line that I am normally experiencing. And the 6th dimension would be like a 3-dimensional space for these world lines of myself to traverse, which would be able to include world lines of myself that never at any point intersected with the worldline that I am now living. So the 5th dimension would include the world-line in the same plane of me becoming a multi-millionaire 30 years from now, and the 6th dimension would include the worldline of me as an alien on the planet Zytran, or me as some kid with his face laying on the ground in some soccer field with people standing around him in a universe where salvia is illegal. Now, like the flatlanders who are constrained to moving in 2 dimensions and who wouldn't even see the degrees of freedom of the higher dimensions, we are constrained to moving in 3 dimensions and can't really visualize the degree of freedom of moving through a deterministic timeline of our life (4th dimension), moving through the many universes of time intersecting with, or probabilistically branching out from, our current state (5th dimension) (so every lifetime that includes this moment of me as I am know, even if the rest of my life in the past or future is different in these other universes--meaning, even if I got to this point differently or departed from this point differently with different random probabilities determining my actions and the actions of the physical universe shaping my behavior), or moving through the many universes of time not even necessarily constrained to intersecting in any way with our current state (6th dimension...which, if I could move in the 6th dimension, I could move to the point in 6th dimensional space where I was a jellyfish swimming in the sea of the planet Vortron). Assuming, for a moment, that salvia allowed one to suddenly interact with stuff from higher dimensions (such as alternate selves as other human persons or even objects), one would perceive these phenomena as, like the balloon to the flatlander, popping in and out of existence non-causally (as far as we could tell...because the causes would be operating along dimensions that we wouldn't be seeing, such as the person pushing the balloon through the flatlander's plane, which the flatlander would never see). And that is at least consistent with the way that salvia, as well as other psychedelic drugs and supernatural phenomena in general, appear to us, so we cannot rule out that, when we are perceiving phenomena that seem outside of the causal laws of our 3-D space, that these phenomena are still subject to causes, but just causes in higher dimensions that we can't perceive. One could understand "God," in this sense, as simply the collection of higher-dimensional causes that seem to produce inexplicable effects on us mere 3-D beings.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Salvia, reincarnated dreamtimes, and the shared nature of the "Matthew" life experience
I had just had an irritatingly tantalizing, yet not thoroughly powerful salvia trip the previous night--just the sort of trip that gives you just enough of a peek at weirdness to intrigue your curiosity, and yet leave it unsatiated. So I wanted to try it again, but this time to do 2 inhalations at the very beginning. I had been wary of doing two inhalations ever since I did a two-inhalation session over a year ago and had the most overwhelming experience I ever would have imagined possible, but now I was ready to tread those waters again.
Unfortunately, my friend who usually trip-sits for me had already gone to bed (it was 2am during a spring break night in my dorm, so I was still up, but he wasn't), so I decided that I would go solo. This would be my first time ever doing it solo. Well, as it turned out, there was no cause for worry--I would have far more company during this trip than I would know what to do with.
So, I went to a spot on this stone terrace above the Cabot dining hall and sat indian-style with my back up against a low stone wall at the absolute point of symmetry of the space, facing the darkened doors and windows of Pforzheimer House. I had written a little note to put at my feet during the trip that said, "Do not disturb...tripping on Salvia...I'll be back in 5 minutes," just in case some stranger happened to walk up upon me while I was tripping, so that they wouldn't freak out if I was behaving strangely or non-responsively. I thought that this would remove any pre-occupation in my mind about being encountered by other people, but I think that there was still a part of this pre-occupation that persisted into my trip, despite my precautionary efforts.
So I composed myself for about 10 minutes and then took two drags (I had my bowl packed pretty much full of Salvia 15x standardized). I could already sense things becoming weird before I even got to counting to 30 with my first hit. So I exhaled after 30 seconds and took another hit. I remember pulling the pipe away from my face, but I don't remember putting the pipe down (although apparently I did, as I found it a few moments later carefully placed right-side up next to my lighter on the stone floor beside me).
The next thing I knew, I was amidst an unseen crowd of sentient, judgmental presences that were gathered all around me just outside of my field of vision. Although I did not see them, I had the same absence of doubt that they were there that I would have if I had just looked around me a second ago and seen them and had them fresh in my mind as something present. As is usual with salvia, I thought nothing unusual about this crowd being here. I did not notice any discontinuity between when they weren't there and when they were there. I just took them for granted at that point.
What were these presences? I think that question is less important, or even illuminating, than asking what they were doing (what message they were conveying), which I will get to in a second. But if I had to characterize them, I'd say that they were thoroughly about as "un-alien" as one could get. Not necessarily "human" in a biological sense (in fact they didn't really seem to be defined along a biological or material dimension), but they were even farther from being little green extra-terrestrials or translucent spirit beings or whatnot. If I had to characterize them, I'd say that they most reminded me of my mental image of parents and coaches that I always used to get during sporting events and band performances--of course, my mental image of these personas is much more critical and apocalyptic than these personas are in real life. That's probably one reason why I could never handle the pressure of sports or music performances--because no matter how non-chalant and positively encouraging my parents or my coaches were, my mind would transform them into these critical personalities that were much more cutthroat--"Play well, or else you will be shunned and left bereft of resources and will be doomed to an ostracized existence, laden with the conveyance of our disappointment in you," etc. Like I said, my rational mind knows that this is not how they really acted or even thought, but still that was my mental image of them. And this was my image of these presences, more or less.
And this gets us to what they were doing. The message that they were conveying was a sort of expectation of performance. They were intently expecting me to perform some task, and the intensity of their intent was so strong, it was like an electric force rushing me along from behind. I felt desperate to placate this expectation, and dread at the thought of failing to do so. I had on the one hand a sense of encouragement, but also a deathly serious sense of sober disappointment on their part, with very bad consequences to follow for me, should I not perform well at this task. Although in reality I was sitting in almost total silence, the intent focus upon me felt like the dull roar of an audience at a basketball game--totally indistinct, with no ability to discern any specific voice or message, but the overall effect and intent was unmistakable. It felt/sounded physically/acoustically cacophonous (those two senses were more or less intertwined).
Well, what was this task that I was desperately trying to keep up at, that I was being expected to do? Well, it's a curious thing because I can't quite say with certainty what it was at first. It seemed almost so omnipresent and self-evident and familiar as to make analysis or reflection upon it unthinkable. At first I was so desperately focused on doing it that I didn't even stop to analyze what I was doing. If you want to jump right ahead to the psychological explanation, you could posit that these presences were a combination of my superego and a hallucination that there were Harvard students or staff that had arrived where I was, and that the task that I was desperately trying to apply myself to was to get a hold back on reality and respond to them in a coherent manner. Or perhaps you could argue that the presences were prodding me about my schoolwork that I still have to get finished during spring break, and that this was the task that I had to do. (Of course, as it would turn out, I would discover that I had been alone and in total darkness the whole time).
I think, though, that, at least in terms of direct experience, the performance had something to do with the square stone tiles that comprised the floor of the terrace on which I was sitting, because this is what seemed to embody the nature of my performance a short moment later. These stone squares were not just squares, though. They had a varying number of edges at a varying degree of magnification within my field of view depending on how difficult the task seemed. When the task seemed most difficult, these objects were more like octagons, and my vision was zoomed in into being able to encompass or take account of one or two edges at once (such that I wouldn't be able to take account of the whole octagon, and could only infer that it was sort of like an octagon by the angles between the edges). Also, when the task seemed more difficult, the whole shape would seem to stand more right-side-up, like a wheel (very reminiscent of my previous Bach trip, I now think), such that I would be climbing over the wheeel and wouldn't be able to see the rest of it (because I was stuck in the same plane as it). And when the task seemed to be getting easier a few seconds later, the shape seemed to tilt to more of a 45-degree angle, such that I could stand outside of its plane and get more of a bird's-eye view of it, like a 3-dimensional being in the book "Flatland" being able to observe a two-dimensional shape. Also, the shape seemed to be losing sides, getting simpler and more and more like a hexagon, a pentagon, and finally a square once again. And the task seemed to be to "take account" of this shape and traverse around it and just generally "get a grip" of its nature in its entirety. And I did this one edge of a time. I would come up over an edge, zooming in, feeling the edge fly past me, and then I'd get over the edge and zoom out suddenly to see the previous edge and the next edge...but then I'd have to zoom into the next edge to overcome and round that one, and after that I'd zoom out after rounding that next edge and I'd be able to see the next edge, and so on.
This is a familiar trope of my salvia experiences, in fact--this feeling that I am compelled to "survey" or "analyze" or "get a more bird's-eye view" of a shape or an abstract entity of some sort into order to zoom back out into a more broadly aware, normal state of mind in which I know where I am situated with respect to eveyrthing else in the world.
As I started to become relieved in seeing the octagons starting to become less complex and starting to become more distinct and "surveyable" (and less a thing that I was wrapped up in and a part of and unable to analyze from the outside), I realized that I was at Harvard and that the spectators would at worst be some harmless Harvard kids or Suraj (who I concluded was there at this point, even though he wasn't, and I was like, "Oh, whew, good, it's only Suraj," and I felt far less imperiled by the notion of being watched by Harvard kids or Suraj than the previous judgmental, powerful, demanding-parent-like entities---these were truly terrifying, not in the sense of being frozen with fear, but of being motivated to engage in an unceasing effort to escape punishment and achieve momentary relief before one feels the expectations nipping at one's heels once again and so one must resume one's never-ending escape. That's the thing, too--I had the distinct sense in the beginning of the trip that this "performance" that I was doing for these spectators was not some extra-ordinary thing, but was rather a commonplace and unending thing, and that I was falling behind in performing it and would see no relief for a long while. So it was really quite a relief to realize that I was just at Harvard and that I didn't have to actively struggle to do anything at that moment, but that if people were watching me (which I was still convinced was the case, just outside of my field of vision), that I could just be calm and still and let this situation pass. Because it was also at this point that I started to remember that I had just taken some salvia, and that I had the sign resting at my feet to explain to any possible passers-by what was going on. But then I realized that, if I had made that sign, then I must have made it because I had known that I wouldn't have anyone with me during the trip, so I started to doubt whether there were really presences around me.
Now, as I was thinking all of this, it appeared to me that I was saying all of this out loud (like, I was hearing my own thoughts out loud, along with all of the babble of the "audience" around me), which was one reason why I was now sure that, if I was indeed at Harvard, that I would have surely attracted attention and at the very least drawn onlookers if there hadn't been any to begin with. But by this point I was able to get a better sense of my surroundings to visually notice that there were no onlookers around me. So then I re-examined the source of this dull roar of the "audience" that I was hearing, and to my surprise it was my own thought process being repeated out-loud at like 2-4 second intervals...sort of "echoing" (and I have glimpsed this phenomenon before with the salvia tincture session I had), except now I see that it really wasn't echoing at all, but rather a layered looping that would continue indefinitely if I paid attention to it--sort of like multiple identical copies of myself being spawned at about 2-second intervals like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwcE3CTp8O4
And I realized that these were the "presences" that I had been hearing and feeling all along--multiple copies of myself. No wonder these presences seemed so "un-alien!" I should say that they should be quite familiar if they are indeed just multiple versions of myself! This of course became particularly interesting when the "original" me would then reflect on this multiplication (and my thoughts still seemed to be getting emitted out loud at this point), and all of the identical copies of me would then chime in with the same self-reflection...it was like each copy of me was going through the same self-reflection and was commenting on itself and on all of the versions of me that were following it at x second intervals. I took advantage of this, though, by chanting a "Fuck yes!" mantra over and over, and soon I got a cacophony of voices chanting "Fuck yes!" in unison with a lot of positive energy pouring out of it. It was great.
Suddenly it seemed that I understood why these presences were so intent upon my "performance"--because my present performance, my existence, was their future. So, just as I contemplate with intent my own future, I am possibly at the same time contemplating the present existence of some version of me that is going through this process x seconds ahead of me.
I then got a jarringly uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I had just touched upon something BIG. I realized that I had felt an even stronger surge of this feeling just a moment beforehand when I had been more deeply in the experience. At that point, the feeling had been borne not out of logical deduction, but from hitting some raw, intuitive nerve, but I had not known what to make of it at the time, and in any case it had seemed to be distracting me from more pressing matters.
This "something BIG" was the uncanny feeling (of which I have had glimpses before during salvia trips) that I am not really "Matthew," that it is quite palpably possible (not just theoretically possible in the detached, intellectualized way with which we are all familiar) that my "Matthew" life is a dream...or, what this latest salvia experience suggested was that this life was the "Matthew Experience"--that perhaps this life is a recorded and digitally stored set of experiences that MANY MANY bored, super-advanced beings in some far-off reality are choosing to re-live in some virtual-reality type of setup, and they are tapping into the different sectors of this "Matthew hard-drive" at several-second intervals. (This thought, by the way, gave me the uncanny feeling at the moment while I was still coming down from the trip that my life must turn out to be extraordinarily SPECIAL in some way if so many beings are tapping into it, out of all of the possible life experiences that must exist...and I wasn't so comfortable in that initial confrontation with the prospect that my life will have something very very remarkable in it before all is said and done. At that moment I felt some sort of eerily strong strange attractor or presentiment towards some future as a modern-day Hitler or Jesus or Antichrist or Bill Gates or something, and of course my critical mind immediately shot this uncanny feeling down as an irrational presumption of grandiosity or delusions of self-importance...but the uncanny feeling remained.
Perhaps my life is like a somewhat popular youtube video for some society of sentient beings in some far-off land. It doesn't seem that implausible if you suppose that the individuals of this race live for a million years. Then a 100-year continuous virtual-reality experience is just like watching a movie. Our own notion of the distinction between dreaming and waking life is no less implausible...try telling a being that lives for only 8 hours in a dream world that he/she/it is just a part of a dream world and that in reality there are beings that live for over 100 years whose dreams are generating the being's reality, and this being will scoff at you as if you were peddling some crackpot science fiction fantasy.
In fact, dreaming makes much more sense amidst this supposition of this life being virtual reality. Sometimes computer systems have errors or bugs. They need to be uploaded or maintained, or else they malfunction. If you don't dream, then you start having hallucinations and general psychological malfunctionings. I am thinking very much of the movie "Dark City," which is really a much less gimmicky and much better version of "The Matrix" that the latter probably sort of ripped off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29
In any case, we basically have no theory of why people (or other animals) need to dream, so this supposition seems just as plausible as any at this point.
Now, if the experience of my life is nothing more than the playback of a stored memory, then that means that at some point the original being that experienced what I am experiencing also took the salvia and had all of these same thoughts, so if salvia really does function as this gateway for stepping outside of one's virtual reality circuitry, that either means that his reality, too, was a generated reality (possibly ad infinitem), or that the original Matthew's suppositions were actually incorrect for his own circumstance, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rest of society caught on to the idea that it would be cool to store experiences and re-live them--especially experiences in which one thinks that one is breaking out of a dream and attaining true self-awareness--so in my case, that would actually be true, and the virtual reality stint would have originally been advertised to me as, "Hey, have you ever wanted to make a shocking revelation of the way the world really is from inside a dream world? Well, we have this stored memory of this guy who thinks that he originally did just that, and he was wrong insofar as applying it to his own time...but we have made the world into just the thing that he supposed, so that when you re-live his experience, it will be true for you, and all the more gratifying when you wake up out of this virtual reality dream of a lifetime!" Perhaps this would make the original Matthew's life significant enough to re-live. Perhaps this "far-off" society of super-advanced beings that is re-living these memories is just a society of humans a hundred years from now whose enjoyment of existence, despite their high-technology, pales in comparison to that enjoyment that was had in this, the "golden age" of humanity, and so they have then made the original "Matthew," whose presentiment that I am re-living tonight ended up being hugely transformative, into a well-revered figure whose life many people are eager to re-live (with the society having managed to store the original Matthew's memories before he died). So, funny enough, I can't even critique these crazy thoughts for being grandiose because, if this were true, then I could not even take credit for being the original Matthew, hahaha.....
In any case, I am always one for making sure that a hypothesis is falsifiable. So here's my falsifiability of this crazy idea:
*If I die in a car wreck tomorrow and my life ends up being pretty much meaningless, then that rules out a lot of these suppositions.
*If I end up becoming a hugely important figure in world history, or if I end up having my memories downloaded and stored somewhere before I die, then that would be a necessary and highly suggestive, but perhaps not sufficient in and of itself, condition for supporting these crazy ideas.
So only time will tell, hahaha.....
But just to make clear exactly what is in dispute: I am not disputing that the life of "Matthew Opitz" is a shared experience among many different entities. This I feel fairly certain about. I also think that my experience rather strongly suggests that this life experience is a deterministic one that I am simply re-living with the illusion that I have "free will," seeing as how all of the subsequent copies of me were saying the exact same things.
Finally, I think that this experience also pretty strongly implies that this "Matthew Opitz life experience" is a vessel that holds these independent entities that, otherwise, have independent existences. Now, what the nature of these other entities and their existence is, or what the nature of my fundamental existence will be when I am no longer Matthew Opitz, is an open question. I put forward one possible explanation involving an advanced society that re-lives the memories of past lives. But it could be something else that is not contingent upon me becoming famous or having my memory uploaded before I die or whatnot. I could just be hitting on what many of the world's major religions have posited: an independent soul, using this body (or rather, this life experience) as a temporary vessel, with an independent existence otherwise. The intriguing part, though, that one does not find in the world's major religions is the idea that multiple "souls" can experience the same body or life experience. This is where the implications concerning some sort of probable self-directed "reincarnation" or choosing of different virtual reality dreamtimes come into play. Whether you want to say that "souls" "choose their own parents" before they are born, or whether you want to phrase it as advanced beings "choosing their virtual reality experience," I think it amounts to the same thing. Now, why on earth would any soul or being choose to re-live the life of a Bangladeshi child who dies at the age of 2? Well, first of all, it is quite possible that such life experiences are shared by many fewer beings--that these life experiences are far less popular. Secondly, perhaps beings/souls want to experience a sense of tragedy or something, just like how we sometimes choose to watch scary or depressing movies. I mean, yeah, the life of a Holocaust victim would be pretty hard to live through, but if you have a million years at your disposal, spending 5 of those years as a Jewish child during the Holocaust in order to gain an insight into the pinnacle of human suffering and tragedy doesn't sound all that implausible to me. The stakes are certainly different than if you suppose that this is the only life you get, in which case choosing to live the life of a Bangladeshi child or a Holocaust victim would be unthinkably masochistic.
Also note: None of this experience or reasoning implies anything like "karma" or the idea that one "deserves" whatever life one has based on some grand scale of moral judgment. My intuition is that this is not how it works at all, but that every soul chooses every life.
And do animals have souls? Probably. It is probably quite possible to, as a soul or super-advanced being, to choose to experience the life experience of caterpillar #A41563879356432w or C. Elegans #T94523410584362597754532133rws...anything with a nervous system and some minimal level of experience, I guess.
Unfortunately, my friend who usually trip-sits for me had already gone to bed (it was 2am during a spring break night in my dorm, so I was still up, but he wasn't), so I decided that I would go solo. This would be my first time ever doing it solo. Well, as it turned out, there was no cause for worry--I would have far more company during this trip than I would know what to do with.
So, I went to a spot on this stone terrace above the Cabot dining hall and sat indian-style with my back up against a low stone wall at the absolute point of symmetry of the space, facing the darkened doors and windows of Pforzheimer House. I had written a little note to put at my feet during the trip that said, "Do not disturb...tripping on Salvia...I'll be back in 5 minutes," just in case some stranger happened to walk up upon me while I was tripping, so that they wouldn't freak out if I was behaving strangely or non-responsively. I thought that this would remove any pre-occupation in my mind about being encountered by other people, but I think that there was still a part of this pre-occupation that persisted into my trip, despite my precautionary efforts.
So I composed myself for about 10 minutes and then took two drags (I had my bowl packed pretty much full of Salvia 15x standardized). I could already sense things becoming weird before I even got to counting to 30 with my first hit. So I exhaled after 30 seconds and took another hit. I remember pulling the pipe away from my face, but I don't remember putting the pipe down (although apparently I did, as I found it a few moments later carefully placed right-side up next to my lighter on the stone floor beside me).
The next thing I knew, I was amidst an unseen crowd of sentient, judgmental presences that were gathered all around me just outside of my field of vision. Although I did not see them, I had the same absence of doubt that they were there that I would have if I had just looked around me a second ago and seen them and had them fresh in my mind as something present. As is usual with salvia, I thought nothing unusual about this crowd being here. I did not notice any discontinuity between when they weren't there and when they were there. I just took them for granted at that point.
What were these presences? I think that question is less important, or even illuminating, than asking what they were doing (what message they were conveying), which I will get to in a second. But if I had to characterize them, I'd say that they were thoroughly about as "un-alien" as one could get. Not necessarily "human" in a biological sense (in fact they didn't really seem to be defined along a biological or material dimension), but they were even farther from being little green extra-terrestrials or translucent spirit beings or whatnot. If I had to characterize them, I'd say that they most reminded me of my mental image of parents and coaches that I always used to get during sporting events and band performances--of course, my mental image of these personas is much more critical and apocalyptic than these personas are in real life. That's probably one reason why I could never handle the pressure of sports or music performances--because no matter how non-chalant and positively encouraging my parents or my coaches were, my mind would transform them into these critical personalities that were much more cutthroat--"Play well, or else you will be shunned and left bereft of resources and will be doomed to an ostracized existence, laden with the conveyance of our disappointment in you," etc. Like I said, my rational mind knows that this is not how they really acted or even thought, but still that was my mental image of them. And this was my image of these presences, more or less.
And this gets us to what they were doing. The message that they were conveying was a sort of expectation of performance. They were intently expecting me to perform some task, and the intensity of their intent was so strong, it was like an electric force rushing me along from behind. I felt desperate to placate this expectation, and dread at the thought of failing to do so. I had on the one hand a sense of encouragement, but also a deathly serious sense of sober disappointment on their part, with very bad consequences to follow for me, should I not perform well at this task. Although in reality I was sitting in almost total silence, the intent focus upon me felt like the dull roar of an audience at a basketball game--totally indistinct, with no ability to discern any specific voice or message, but the overall effect and intent was unmistakable. It felt/sounded physically/acoustically cacophonous (those two senses were more or less intertwined).
Well, what was this task that I was desperately trying to keep up at, that I was being expected to do? Well, it's a curious thing because I can't quite say with certainty what it was at first. It seemed almost so omnipresent and self-evident and familiar as to make analysis or reflection upon it unthinkable. At first I was so desperately focused on doing it that I didn't even stop to analyze what I was doing. If you want to jump right ahead to the psychological explanation, you could posit that these presences were a combination of my superego and a hallucination that there were Harvard students or staff that had arrived where I was, and that the task that I was desperately trying to apply myself to was to get a hold back on reality and respond to them in a coherent manner. Or perhaps you could argue that the presences were prodding me about my schoolwork that I still have to get finished during spring break, and that this was the task that I had to do. (Of course, as it would turn out, I would discover that I had been alone and in total darkness the whole time).
I think, though, that, at least in terms of direct experience, the performance had something to do with the square stone tiles that comprised the floor of the terrace on which I was sitting, because this is what seemed to embody the nature of my performance a short moment later. These stone squares were not just squares, though. They had a varying number of edges at a varying degree of magnification within my field of view depending on how difficult the task seemed. When the task seemed most difficult, these objects were more like octagons, and my vision was zoomed in into being able to encompass or take account of one or two edges at once (such that I wouldn't be able to take account of the whole octagon, and could only infer that it was sort of like an octagon by the angles between the edges). Also, when the task seemed more difficult, the whole shape would seem to stand more right-side-up, like a wheel (very reminiscent of my previous Bach trip, I now think), such that I would be climbing over the wheeel and wouldn't be able to see the rest of it (because I was stuck in the same plane as it). And when the task seemed to be getting easier a few seconds later, the shape seemed to tilt to more of a 45-degree angle, such that I could stand outside of its plane and get more of a bird's-eye view of it, like a 3-dimensional being in the book "Flatland" being able to observe a two-dimensional shape. Also, the shape seemed to be losing sides, getting simpler and more and more like a hexagon, a pentagon, and finally a square once again. And the task seemed to be to "take account" of this shape and traverse around it and just generally "get a grip" of its nature in its entirety. And I did this one edge of a time. I would come up over an edge, zooming in, feeling the edge fly past me, and then I'd get over the edge and zoom out suddenly to see the previous edge and the next edge...but then I'd have to zoom into the next edge to overcome and round that one, and after that I'd zoom out after rounding that next edge and I'd be able to see the next edge, and so on.
This is a familiar trope of my salvia experiences, in fact--this feeling that I am compelled to "survey" or "analyze" or "get a more bird's-eye view" of a shape or an abstract entity of some sort into order to zoom back out into a more broadly aware, normal state of mind in which I know where I am situated with respect to eveyrthing else in the world.
As I started to become relieved in seeing the octagons starting to become less complex and starting to become more distinct and "surveyable" (and less a thing that I was wrapped up in and a part of and unable to analyze from the outside), I realized that I was at Harvard and that the spectators would at worst be some harmless Harvard kids or Suraj (who I concluded was there at this point, even though he wasn't, and I was like, "Oh, whew, good, it's only Suraj," and I felt far less imperiled by the notion of being watched by Harvard kids or Suraj than the previous judgmental, powerful, demanding-parent-like entities---these were truly terrifying, not in the sense of being frozen with fear, but of being motivated to engage in an unceasing effort to escape punishment and achieve momentary relief before one feels the expectations nipping at one's heels once again and so one must resume one's never-ending escape. That's the thing, too--I had the distinct sense in the beginning of the trip that this "performance" that I was doing for these spectators was not some extra-ordinary thing, but was rather a commonplace and unending thing, and that I was falling behind in performing it and would see no relief for a long while. So it was really quite a relief to realize that I was just at Harvard and that I didn't have to actively struggle to do anything at that moment, but that if people were watching me (which I was still convinced was the case, just outside of my field of vision), that I could just be calm and still and let this situation pass. Because it was also at this point that I started to remember that I had just taken some salvia, and that I had the sign resting at my feet to explain to any possible passers-by what was going on. But then I realized that, if I had made that sign, then I must have made it because I had known that I wouldn't have anyone with me during the trip, so I started to doubt whether there were really presences around me.
Now, as I was thinking all of this, it appeared to me that I was saying all of this out loud (like, I was hearing my own thoughts out loud, along with all of the babble of the "audience" around me), which was one reason why I was now sure that, if I was indeed at Harvard, that I would have surely attracted attention and at the very least drawn onlookers if there hadn't been any to begin with. But by this point I was able to get a better sense of my surroundings to visually notice that there were no onlookers around me. So then I re-examined the source of this dull roar of the "audience" that I was hearing, and to my surprise it was my own thought process being repeated out-loud at like 2-4 second intervals...sort of "echoing" (and I have glimpsed this phenomenon before with the salvia tincture session I had), except now I see that it really wasn't echoing at all, but rather a layered looping that would continue indefinitely if I paid attention to it--sort of like multiple identical copies of myself being spawned at about 2-second intervals like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwcE3CTp8O4
And I realized that these were the "presences" that I had been hearing and feeling all along--multiple copies of myself. No wonder these presences seemed so "un-alien!" I should say that they should be quite familiar if they are indeed just multiple versions of myself! This of course became particularly interesting when the "original" me would then reflect on this multiplication (and my thoughts still seemed to be getting emitted out loud at this point), and all of the identical copies of me would then chime in with the same self-reflection...it was like each copy of me was going through the same self-reflection and was commenting on itself and on all of the versions of me that were following it at x second intervals. I took advantage of this, though, by chanting a "Fuck yes!" mantra over and over, and soon I got a cacophony of voices chanting "Fuck yes!" in unison with a lot of positive energy pouring out of it. It was great.
Suddenly it seemed that I understood why these presences were so intent upon my "performance"--because my present performance, my existence, was their future. So, just as I contemplate with intent my own future, I am possibly at the same time contemplating the present existence of some version of me that is going through this process x seconds ahead of me.
I then got a jarringly uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I had just touched upon something BIG. I realized that I had felt an even stronger surge of this feeling just a moment beforehand when I had been more deeply in the experience. At that point, the feeling had been borne not out of logical deduction, but from hitting some raw, intuitive nerve, but I had not known what to make of it at the time, and in any case it had seemed to be distracting me from more pressing matters.
This "something BIG" was the uncanny feeling (of which I have had glimpses before during salvia trips) that I am not really "Matthew," that it is quite palpably possible (not just theoretically possible in the detached, intellectualized way with which we are all familiar) that my "Matthew" life is a dream...or, what this latest salvia experience suggested was that this life was the "Matthew Experience"--that perhaps this life is a recorded and digitally stored set of experiences that MANY MANY bored, super-advanced beings in some far-off reality are choosing to re-live in some virtual-reality type of setup, and they are tapping into the different sectors of this "Matthew hard-drive" at several-second intervals. (This thought, by the way, gave me the uncanny feeling at the moment while I was still coming down from the trip that my life must turn out to be extraordinarily SPECIAL in some way if so many beings are tapping into it, out of all of the possible life experiences that must exist...and I wasn't so comfortable in that initial confrontation with the prospect that my life will have something very very remarkable in it before all is said and done. At that moment I felt some sort of eerily strong strange attractor or presentiment towards some future as a modern-day Hitler or Jesus or Antichrist or Bill Gates or something, and of course my critical mind immediately shot this uncanny feeling down as an irrational presumption of grandiosity or delusions of self-importance...but the uncanny feeling remained.
Perhaps my life is like a somewhat popular youtube video for some society of sentient beings in some far-off land. It doesn't seem that implausible if you suppose that the individuals of this race live for a million years. Then a 100-year continuous virtual-reality experience is just like watching a movie. Our own notion of the distinction between dreaming and waking life is no less implausible...try telling a being that lives for only 8 hours in a dream world that he/she/it is just a part of a dream world and that in reality there are beings that live for over 100 years whose dreams are generating the being's reality, and this being will scoff at you as if you were peddling some crackpot science fiction fantasy.
In fact, dreaming makes much more sense amidst this supposition of this life being virtual reality. Sometimes computer systems have errors or bugs. They need to be uploaded or maintained, or else they malfunction. If you don't dream, then you start having hallucinations and general psychological malfunctionings. I am thinking very much of the movie "Dark City," which is really a much less gimmicky and much better version of "The Matrix" that the latter probably sort of ripped off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29
In any case, we basically have no theory of why people (or other animals) need to dream, so this supposition seems just as plausible as any at this point.
Now, if the experience of my life is nothing more than the playback of a stored memory, then that means that at some point the original being that experienced what I am experiencing also took the salvia and had all of these same thoughts, so if salvia really does function as this gateway for stepping outside of one's virtual reality circuitry, that either means that his reality, too, was a generated reality (possibly ad infinitem), or that the original Matthew's suppositions were actually incorrect for his own circumstance, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rest of society caught on to the idea that it would be cool to store experiences and re-live them--especially experiences in which one thinks that one is breaking out of a dream and attaining true self-awareness--so in my case, that would actually be true, and the virtual reality stint would have originally been advertised to me as, "Hey, have you ever wanted to make a shocking revelation of the way the world really is from inside a dream world? Well, we have this stored memory of this guy who thinks that he originally did just that, and he was wrong insofar as applying it to his own time...but we have made the world into just the thing that he supposed, so that when you re-live his experience, it will be true for you, and all the more gratifying when you wake up out of this virtual reality dream of a lifetime!" Perhaps this would make the original Matthew's life significant enough to re-live. Perhaps this "far-off" society of super-advanced beings that is re-living these memories is just a society of humans a hundred years from now whose enjoyment of existence, despite their high-technology, pales in comparison to that enjoyment that was had in this, the "golden age" of humanity, and so they have then made the original "Matthew," whose presentiment that I am re-living tonight ended up being hugely transformative, into a well-revered figure whose life many people are eager to re-live (with the society having managed to store the original Matthew's memories before he died). So, funny enough, I can't even critique these crazy thoughts for being grandiose because, if this were true, then I could not even take credit for being the original Matthew, hahaha.....
In any case, I am always one for making sure that a hypothesis is falsifiable. So here's my falsifiability of this crazy idea:
*If I die in a car wreck tomorrow and my life ends up being pretty much meaningless, then that rules out a lot of these suppositions.
*If I end up becoming a hugely important figure in world history, or if I end up having my memories downloaded and stored somewhere before I die, then that would be a necessary and highly suggestive, but perhaps not sufficient in and of itself, condition for supporting these crazy ideas.
So only time will tell, hahaha.....
But just to make clear exactly what is in dispute: I am not disputing that the life of "Matthew Opitz" is a shared experience among many different entities. This I feel fairly certain about. I also think that my experience rather strongly suggests that this life experience is a deterministic one that I am simply re-living with the illusion that I have "free will," seeing as how all of the subsequent copies of me were saying the exact same things.
Finally, I think that this experience also pretty strongly implies that this "Matthew Opitz life experience" is a vessel that holds these independent entities that, otherwise, have independent existences. Now, what the nature of these other entities and their existence is, or what the nature of my fundamental existence will be when I am no longer Matthew Opitz, is an open question. I put forward one possible explanation involving an advanced society that re-lives the memories of past lives. But it could be something else that is not contingent upon me becoming famous or having my memory uploaded before I die or whatnot. I could just be hitting on what many of the world's major religions have posited: an independent soul, using this body (or rather, this life experience) as a temporary vessel, with an independent existence otherwise. The intriguing part, though, that one does not find in the world's major religions is the idea that multiple "souls" can experience the same body or life experience. This is where the implications concerning some sort of probable self-directed "reincarnation" or choosing of different virtual reality dreamtimes come into play. Whether you want to say that "souls" "choose their own parents" before they are born, or whether you want to phrase it as advanced beings "choosing their virtual reality experience," I think it amounts to the same thing. Now, why on earth would any soul or being choose to re-live the life of a Bangladeshi child who dies at the age of 2? Well, first of all, it is quite possible that such life experiences are shared by many fewer beings--that these life experiences are far less popular. Secondly, perhaps beings/souls want to experience a sense of tragedy or something, just like how we sometimes choose to watch scary or depressing movies. I mean, yeah, the life of a Holocaust victim would be pretty hard to live through, but if you have a million years at your disposal, spending 5 of those years as a Jewish child during the Holocaust in order to gain an insight into the pinnacle of human suffering and tragedy doesn't sound all that implausible to me. The stakes are certainly different than if you suppose that this is the only life you get, in which case choosing to live the life of a Bangladeshi child or a Holocaust victim would be unthinkably masochistic.
Also note: None of this experience or reasoning implies anything like "karma" or the idea that one "deserves" whatever life one has based on some grand scale of moral judgment. My intuition is that this is not how it works at all, but that every soul chooses every life.
And do animals have souls? Probably. It is probably quite possible to, as a soul or super-advanced being, to choose to experience the life experience of caterpillar #A41563879356432w or C. Elegans #T94523410584362597754532133rws...anything with a nervous system and some minimal level of experience, I guess.
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