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.
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