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.