On Psychedelic Culture and Modern Mystery Religions

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.

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.

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.

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.

The principles of the mechanics of Salvia spacetime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salvia Tron-scape

I wrote this about 20 minutes after the trip.
Dose: 1 full breath of 15x standardized.

==========

So, I'm just coming off of it right now (did it about 20 minutes ago and still feel a little of that weird woosiness). But I want to get this down as quickly as possible.

So, my friends and I were down by the river. I was sitting on a park bench, looking at the moonlight. Before I even got to exhaling the smoke, I started seeing double of the moon. Then I got a slight swirling in my head/vision, like when one wakes up drunk with a really bad hangover (but I was not nauseous). As I put the pipe down, I became very very very small. Like, 2 cm vs. my friend who was sitting next to me as like 50ft tall. At first I couldn't recognize what this big square black wall thing was (and it was outlined in yellow (perhaps from being silhouetted by passing car lights)). The wall had a cartoonish sun/yellow-brown happy face in the corner smiling at me (I have since figured out that this might have stemmed from me looking at the pipe that I was setting down (the happy-face sun), next to my friend's thighs and back (which would have formed the square wall) as he was sitting there). I could feel myself returning to a familiar physical reality, similar to the last Salvia experience, and I had a whole conversation with myself about ("Oh, this is exactly the same place as last time! Now I understand what some of these accounts on the Internet that I read are talking about, with yourself returning to your own particular special place on some subsequent occasions." I also started noticing the time-distortion, and I started saying to myself, "Whoa, man, this is gonna take a long time, good thing I don't have to take anymore...I know it's gotta wear off soon..." But my friend is telling me that I need to take another hit, and I'm thinking, "Whoa, no way, man, the time-dilation would be so bad in that case, I'd go through a whole mental lifetime, grow old, and die psychologically, before I got to come back..." Then the phone rang (in reality, about 5 seconds after I had set the pipe down--notice this whole conversation with myself and then with my friend had taken place in that span of time), and I remember feeling a fear just on the edge of myself that my arm was going to reach down against my will, open the phone, and that whoever was on the phone would convince me to do another hit, thus banishing me to this realm forever (psychologically speaking)," so I said to my friends, "Don't answer it! Just let it go! Just let it go!" Then my friends suggested that I stand up and walk around a bit. That I found not difficult at all physically, and I was finding it to be a trivial, pointless exercise, a diversion of my attention from more interesting matters. Because what I was now seeing was vast 3-d solar planar surface strobing of objects in 3 dimensions, like this:
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumb_218/1197672403qluBQP.jpg
But imagine the forwards/backwards dimension stretched to infinity with a continued solid surface. These 3-d solid planar strobings to infinity were not just shooting out of one forwards/backwards plane, but would shoot out of anything that I focused my attention onto, and would sometimes overlap (the strobings from the more forefront objects would strobe back onto and cover up the objects more in the background). The strobing was all headed off in the same direction---to my right, along the way the bench was sitting. My friends suggested walking in that direction, just to see if I could do it, which I found halfway annoying, and halfway bemusing because it was such a trivial thing to do (and I told them this much), because out that direction was just more of the solid-color planar strobing, whereas what I really wanted to pay attention to and contemplate was the interface of the 3 dimensions on the objects themselves. I was bemused because I realized how I was going to be able to explain none of this to my friends right then, and how they would have no idea of how trivial their recommendations and expectations were compared to the astoundingness of my reality and my inquiries at that moment. I felt a tad bit of pride at that moment from this. Nevertheless, just to prove to them that I could walk and whatnot, I hopped around and talked about how I felt ready to run a marathon or something, if need be, just to show off. Just about then the strobing was going away (the time dilation had started to wear off as I was getting up, although as I was getting up it was still with me, and it became very clear to me how the mechanics of walking were possible on Salvia. True, one had no coordination, as if one were drunk. But the time-dilation was such that if one started to lose one's balance, one had like 5 mental seconds to realize what was going on and correct one's body consciously, as if in slow motion, before one had stumbled any). I sat back down and tried to explain everything, with mainly just the weird woosiness now persisting...but also with many fake-come-downs interspersed (which sort of felt like fake-wake-ups from dreams). What I mean is, a sudden ratching "down" back into normal consciousness, except one discovers that one isn't *really* totally back until one feels the next ratcheting down, and so on, for many times, with a much smaller magnitude each, this time (whereas last time, there were 4 or so of these ratchetings, each one corresponding to some searing burst of monumental revelation and a rotation of the then-circle geometry (this time, a huge square was the center of my attention at first, and it did not rotate periodically like the wheel from last time).

This time was definitely less extreme than last time. I did not forget who I was. I only forgot where I was for a moment (when I was first looking at the 50ft. black wall, outlined in yellow (that I would later see in 3-d strobe planes at a different angle and shrunken scale)), and throughout I was able to keep thoughts together in language in my own head (but trying to say them at first seemed to take forever physically, like swimming through molasses, and just didn't seem worth it to divert my attention to that, rather than observing what was going on). In the beginning of this time, I was even able to think back to last time on Salvia and notice that things were really quite similar (and I even think now that there was that smiling sun on the first time, of which I got reminded in this time, but that may have been just a memory manufactured in the moment during my 2nd time, by extrapolating from what else was similar with last time (the time distortion). But this still felt fuckin' extreme...like a clear reminder that my goal would be to maximize the ratio of "mental replay potential"/"Salvia-state mentally-experienced time." Feeling like things are lasting an eternity is certainly not a good feeling. But it's necessary to achieve the vision, which one can visually replay in one's mind, at a safe distance from it, and then later solidify into words the experience to allow your imagination to decode it later when your mind has lost the hi-fidelity image of it...which is what I am doing now, in fact!

Aspects of Salvia media coverage that make me laugh and cry

1. "Salvia, sometimes known on the street as Sally-D, Magic Mint, or Maria Pastora..."

This misdirection is quite subtle, and thus possibly one of the more pernicious of scare tactics directed against Salvia. I would not dispute that, in theory, some people refer to Salvia Divinorum by these names. Where such allusions are misleading is by implying that Salvia is some shady drug that teens are buying on the street. No, thankfully, because Salvia is still legal, pretty much all Salvia users buy it from reputable online sellers such as bouncingbearbotanicals.com, or from local head shops, and when referring to Salvia, people generally refer to it by its official species name, Salvia Divinorum. I have certainly never heard of someone buying Salvia "off the street" when such a measure would be completely unnecessary and counter-productive. Because it is still legal in most places, such measures are unnecessary. Let's keep it that way.

2. "The effects last up to 30 minutes, with some lingering effects lasting up to several days."

No, this is just flat wrong. Laughably wrong. 3-5 minutes for the peak experience, with a little funkiness up to 10-15 minutes after that. That's all. Guaranteed. (Assuming one is using the smoking method, of course!...but even when ingesting Salvia, I would expects lasting a few hours at most. In any case, this is clearly not what media sources are alluding to in their scare stories).

3. "Salvia, a drug that produces a legal high similar to LSD..."

No, sorry, Salvia trips are nothing like those from LSD. The time-scale is completely different, the emotional aspect is completely different, and even the "visual" "hallucinations" are completely different (for example, with Salvia it is rare to have simply a visual hallucination. Usually the visual aspect is fundamentally integrated with some ego-aspect or some feeling of being pushed or pulled by various geometric forces and whatnot. This is, qualitatively, very different from LSD, from what I understand. Are the two drugs even on the same level of intensity? No, I'd say, if anything, Salvia must be judged to be the stronger of the two because during the Salvia peak one cannot remotely even contemplate interacting with the outside world or even comprehending what an outside world would be. From what I understand, only DMT approaches this similar level of disconnection from the normal world. Which brings me to...

4. "Law enforcement officers worry what effect Salvia could have on teens behind the wheel..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwS5sPOzb0
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=241125&title=celebrity-video-tommy-chong-vs.
'Nuff said.

Besides, people injure and kill themselves all the time from the motor discoordination wrought by alcohol. Why, then, is not alcohol illegal across the board? Likewise, water can kill you if you abuse it (drink too much of it). Too much sugar can kill you. Oxygen can kill you (if you hyperventilate). Just because there is the potential to abuse something does not mean that it makes sense to legislate around the assumption that it will always be abused. For the people who abuse a substance, we punish and/or treat with medical help. For the others who go around drinking alcohol, eating sugar, and breathing oxygen in non-abusive manners, we let them live their lives freely without the nanny-State interfering.

5. "Parents and substance abuse counselors worry that Salvia addiction could derail teens' lives..."

Addiction? Whaaat? Salvia is a kappa opiod receptor agonist, which means it has a tendency to produce dysphoria which, when combined with the startling changes in reality, means that there is practically no chance of getting addicted. The main reason why people generally choose to return to Salvia is simply because of the curiosity and/or mystical/intellectual/perceptual revelations sparked by each bizarre encounter with it.

6. "Brett Chidester, who committed suicide after taking Salvia, has served as a warning to parents and lawmakers of what potential dangers lurk within this legal plant..."

Not only is this, as far as I know, the only death to be even remotely associated with Salvia Divinorum in the history of the drug so far, but the connection between Brett Chidester's consumption of Salvia and his suicide has not been persuasively demonstrated. I would wager that Brett also watched TV at some point in his life before committing suicide. Is TV equally to blame? I imagine Brett must have faced at least one problem at school or had at least one disagreement with his parents at some point in his life before he committed suicide. There are a host of factors that could account for his decision to commit suicide. More examples of correlation between Salvia use and suicide would need to exist before we could even speculate about Salvia's tendency to induce suicidal behavior (and that would still be only correlation, which, without then identifying a causative relationship between Salvia and suicide, would be rather shaky ground for pronouncing any medical or legal judgment). There is, of course, that suicide note in which Brett claims that Salvia convinced him to take his life, but there is the obvious possibility that he is simply grasping for a dramatic rationalization for his decision. There is, of course, also the possibility that the suicide note is not authentic. And even if Brett's death could be definitely tied to Salvia, that is still just one death, compared to thousands of deaths from alcohol (legal), and hundreds of thousands of deaths from tobacco (legal), every year. If Salvia were restricted to over-18 year-olds and included a surgeon general's warning: "May cause suicide," would that satisfy frightened parents, as it seems to do for tobacco and alcohol?

7. "If you encounter someone who is under the effects of Salvia Divinorum, call 911..."

No, just chill the fuck out...jesus...all you need to do is give the person some gentle general support for about 5 minutes, and everything will be fine.

8. "Signs of Salvia exposure include dilated pupils, decreased heart rate..."

No, signs of Salvia exposure include noticing that the person is in the process of tripping the fuck out. Seriously, it is as if these news articles on Salvia have done no research or first-hand investigation on the topic, and have simply copied and pasted generic information from WebMD or something. This sort of claim is also misleading because it obscures the fact that, 15 minutes after initial inhalation, Salvia "exposure" (as news stories often put it) would be virtually undetectable.

Salvia Divinorum meets Plato, Kant, Freud, and Bach

What follows is an account of the most intense, revelatory experience of my entire life, an experience that I don't think I will ever want to repeat again in my life, but which I'm glad I did have. And, besides that, I believe it might be of some philosophical and psychological import.

The sparknotes summary: Freud was completely right, Kant and Plato were completely wrong, and Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 was waaaay too overwhelming to have playing during a Salvia experience. Or perhaps it was just right. It was not an unpleasant experience, just bat-shit-insane extreme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzY3tFTz9k
That's what I chose to have playing. I had a feeling that the absolute mathematical perfection and periodicity of the piece, its chord progressions, etc., would be perfect for comfortably structuring the experience. I thought that it would be better to have something that is totally predictable and that comfortably fills up the room with a warm sound, than to risk having random noise interruptions come into play. To a certain extent, I think I was prudent in this respect, although the part about 1:54 into the piece, where he's going down the scales and doing that sort of electric guitar solo sort of thing, that was waaaay overwhelming, and literally impacted me physically as a sort of waterfall washing over me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the background:

Salvia is an entheogenic dissociative hallucinogen, traditionally used by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca for generations, and just recently discovered by Western science and Western drug culture. For more background on Salvia, watch this documentary:
Sacred Weeds:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4829797616419921428

Fortunately, Salvia is not regulated (Yet) under Federal law, nor (yet) under Massachusetts law. (I say "yet" because, like I said, this drug is relatively new to Western culture, and lately states have been rushing to make it illegal. It has already been made illegal in Missouri, for example. Now, in my opinion, that's completely unnecessary, and probably counter-productive. This substance is not addictive (trust me, there's no way in hell this thing could be addictive), you are as harmless as a puppy to others while you are on it (usually completely immobilized, and if mobile at all, then completely uncoordinated (if not totally unaware of your surroundings) and only a potential harm to yourself if there happen to be things like open flames or sharp objects that you could bumble into (which is a reason why it's advisable to have a sitter with you). Additionally, Salvia only lasts 5-10 minutes, it is non-toxic, it has no known side effects, aside from a potential for some minor headaches afterwards and sweating during the experience, and there are no known adverse long-term effects. Anyways, because it is currently legal in Massachusetts, that's why I feel perfectly comfortable discussing this on facebook and elsewhere. The free exchange of information and experiences is an important reason for keeping it legal, if nothing else. At least people will be able to educate themselves about it before they do it.

News reports suggesting that people "get impaired judgment" on this stuff or that people would be a "danger on the road" are laughable. If you take a reasonable dose, you will have NO judgments at all and NO ability to physically do anything, much less even attempt to drive a car. I'm sure some idiot somewhere at some point will take a mild dose and then try to drive a car and kill someone, but there are thousands of idiots who abuse alcohol and get themselves and others killed. We can't make the whole world idiot-proof, and there will always be idiots, so we just need to deal with them as they come along. Obviously, driving on Salvia should be illegal, I don't think anyone would dispute that. And maybe you would want to regulate Salvia so that there is an age requirement for buying it, because you really do need to be an informed adult to mess with this stuff. But should it be made totally illegal? No, of course not.

Now, given that it's currently legal and has no major side effects, why would I not want to take it ever again? Because one "breakthrough" is more than enough, oh boy. The experience was so goddamn intense, the thought of doing it again just seems inconceivable right now.

Last night was actually my second time doing it, but the first time I did it, I didn't do as much (only half a bowl of 10x extract) or inhale as well, and I got a much milder effect. That time, I was listening to Bach's "Air" from Suite No. 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyLo9-Voy5s

Naturally, that was also bound to facilitate a gentler experience. Basically, that time, I never lost my ego or my grounding in reality. I felt a little dreamy, like an elusive "something" was happening, but I maintained a consistent train of consciousness throughout. There were no "discontinuous functions" of existence, if you will, just gentle, sloping functions. When I would open my eyes, everything continued to look as before, although there was a moment where there seemed to be a clear, viscous, rotating fluid filling the room, barely perceptible to my vision, like dissolved sugar in water. The one other notable moment in that 5-minute experience was one where I got a distinct emotional feeling of tender, innocent, and eager, quasi-erotic puppy love well up in me for a brief moment--the sort of feeling I had at first with my very first girlfriend, and that I've never quite felt since. I remember gently biting my lip at this point, sort of like when you are aroused during a sexual act. It was a rewarding, wholesome moment, a revisitation of something I now realize I've lost to a certain extent, and something that I would like to rediscover, if at all possible. After that, there was a point where another friend walked in (there were already 3 friends trip-sitting for me in the room. We were all taking turns). I remember hearing his steps in the hallway and it seeming like the steps were echoing in some reaaaaally reaaaaaally long cavern. When he walked in, I opened my eyes and mumbled to him with a grin, "Howdy thar" and I sort of gestured to him with a sort of salute, and at that moment I was overcome with giggles galore. The juxtaposition of the baroque music, all my friends sitting there in a college dorm room, and my "howdy thar" all seemed so incredibly ridiculous. So I pretty much gleefully giggled for the rest of the time, for half a minute or so, until I had more or less come out of it. I came away feeling that it was a very worthwhile experience. Not exactly "pleasurable," but it upwelled some wholesome emotions in me and gave me some reflections on that puppy-love feeling that I've been missing in life.

This second time was, I guess, "worthwhile" too, but in a totally different way. Again, none of it was "pleasant" or "unpleasant" in a sensory sort of way. It was just incredibly shocking.

I went into this second time thinking that it would be a bit like the first. I didn't really have a strong desire to do it again, but I was curious to see what would happen this time, and we had a little bit left, so we figured we might as well use up the rest of it (this time, I had 2 friends with me, trip-sitting and waiting to go for their turn).

I did about 3/4 of a bowl of the same 10x extract. It was nothing like the first. Well, I was also listening to a more energetic Bach piece, and I was a little keyed-up, but tired, after having had a busy week, so maybe that influenced it.

Here's the narrative:

I take two hits on the pipe. I could already feel some of the first effects during my second hit. My friends start the music. I lay down, close my eyes. A period of time elapses that seems vague, lacking in substance, and long, like when you go to sleep, wake up, but can't remember dreaming anything, but yet at the same time, not like those times where you just blink and wake back up again. You have a vague awareness that some time has passed, but that is all. In this case, even though it felt long, I have been able to ascertain (from reconstructing the timeline from my memory of the later parts of the song playing--and the song was only a little over 3 minute long) that this part must have been like only 10 seconds. Then...

Next thing "I" can remember, "I" am trying to climb up and upon the floor and the music, which are both physically integrated as a sort of big wheel. But not only am I hallucinating--I am hallucinating not even as "myself" who understands what a hallucination is.

I say "I" or "myself" in quotation marks because I had no concept of "I" at this point. I had heard of people talk about this sort of state before, of being separated from the ego, and I used to think, "Ah, that's bullshit, how would that even work? The ego is, like, fundamental to existence. They've got to be imagining all of this stuff." I never really believed in Freudian psychology...until now.

My consciousness was a complete blank-slate. Everything I had known and experienced from my entire life before that was gone, and I was totally lacking in any awareness of that absence in the first place. That moment felt like the beginning of my entire existence, and yet I had no concept of a beginning of an existence at the time. All of this I'm telling you know is from my re-realizations that occurred to me after I had reached the 2nd plane of consciousness and was looking back on my immediate past from the 1st plane of consciousness. What do I mean by "planes of consciousness"?

*1st plane of consciousness: I am an id without an ego or a superego. I have no self-reflection, no Vernunft (Reason), no Wille (Will), no awareness that "I" am an id, no awareness of what an "I", an "id", or an "ego" would be. I don't have a concept of culminative feelings, such as pleasure or pain. All I have is "Drive." Trieb (to use the Freudian term in the original German). All "I" had was aversion or attraction to acting on stimuli, with no awareness that this wheel that I am trying to climb constitutes a "stimuli" or that I have a "Trieb" that I am responding to in the first place. I had no idea why I was trying to climb the wheel, nor any concept of why I would need to have a reason to climb the wheel, nor any idea of what constituted a "wheel," or "climbing" or cause-and-effect, or something as "space-like" or "time-like" or anything. I try to climb the wheel, not because I anticipate renewed pleasure from doing so, nor because I am aware of a drive to do so, but just because that drive is there, driving me (of course, nor do I have any concept of "it", as a foreign force, driving "me." It's not foreign, it's just all there is, and I'm not even aware of it at this point. And besides, although I had perfectly vivid and precise sensory information coming at me (in other words, even though I had no categories of reason to structure it, the "world" as I knew it was still there as clear as ever), I would have been incapable of picking out this Trieb as something distinct from any other stimulus. All there was was the totality of stimuli, without any essential or categorical markers. Only after later reflection could I distinguish, for example, one aspect of the total stimulus as a "wheel" with essential wheel-like characteristics. I consider this to be a resounding rebuttal to Plato's idea of the "ideal forms" as fundamental to existence. Au contraire, my friend, apparently there can conceivably be existence outside of ideal forms. The material world is fundamental, and we manufacture ideal forms to summarize all of this stimulus so as to figure out a short-hand for how the world's cause-and effect-works so that we can react to it.

At this point, as far as I could tell, this was the only existence that "I" had ever experienced (but I wasn't even able to self-reflect on it, nor was I aware of a lack of ability to do so). I now imagine that this is what it feels like to be a lizard, an ant, or a lobotomized human.

The first searing burst of revelation came after getting myself over one of the nodes of the wheel (the wheel had nodes like a paddle wheel (the paddles are the nodes) or a ferris wheel (the passenger cars are the nodes). As I came up over the node, an entire new filter of existence opened up before me. Suddenly all of the shapes "slid" into their ideal forms. I recognized the wheel as a wheel. And I recognized myself as an "I". This burst of revelation was like being a devoted Catholic all your life, and suddenly learning without a doubt that God doesn't exist. It was like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDgXQPxzY8E

Now began the most interesting portion of my experience, the 2nd level of consciousness, me as an ego and with reason, but still without my life history. I began to reflect on my experiences that I just had during my 1st level of consciousness as one would reflect on an eternity of existence (at this time, my 1st and 2nd level existences were all that I knew). I had perfect, vivid memory of this 1st level time (and even now, I fortunately still have fairly vivid memory of the whole thing, even the earliest pre-ego stage, but I am writing this down now the day after, partly in order to also get this recorded, lest details slip away from me). I also began to reflect on my current existence around me, the wheel of the floor and the music spinning, which was still the center of my attention, and which I was still trying to climb, but now I found pleasure in it, and a desire to do more of it, and it became a rewarding sort of game to be doing it. At this point, I thought nothing strange of the fact that the music was physically integrated with the floor and that I was climbing on it. Also, time would often seem to slow down or speed up depending on how fast the wheel was turning, as if those two things were mechanically connected as well. And when I would ponder my immediately preceding pre-ego existence, it was as if I could really time-travel and relive those moments again momentarily, but this time as my 2nd-level self with my 2nd-level self-reflection (I still had no concept of "levels," per se, just that the previous segment of existence was very very strange). Also, I had no idea that anything was particularly strange about this reality around me, with me climbing on the music and doing momentary time-travel and whatnot. This seemed perfectly normal, just how the world worked. I guess I had no a priori ideas or structures to suggest otherwise. This does not seem to support Kant's case for a priori structures for perceiving existence, am I right?

After a few moments of this, I rounded another node on the wheel and got my 2nd and most shocking searing burst of re-realization: an awareness of my entire life history flooded back to me, I realized that there was existence that preceded the 1st level, that I was myself, a college student, and that I had just smoked some Salvia. I saw myself climbing a wheel of floor and music in my friend's dorm room, and realized two things:
1. The world does not actually work like this. I'm tripping balls.
2. I *should* (now with more of the superego tinge of meaning) not be up out of the bed, trying to climb imaginary things, or else I'm going to freak my friends out and look like a psycho. (So, yeah, this is also, apparently, when my superego came flooding back, the most brutal re-realization of them all. Before that, I didn't have any thoughts of "should" or "should not").

So this is when I started to freak out and desperately yearn for the experience to be over. At this point, I'm hallucinating, and I know that I'm hallucinating. I guess that's worse than hallucinating, but being totally unaware, like being totally in the Matrix, vs. being re-introduced to the Matrix.

This is also the point when the Bach harpsichord solo got to the part with the fast descending scales at about 1:55 seconds in. The music now looked and felt like a pillar of water shooting out of my friend's computer, over the wheel, and splashing down from the wheel and drenching me. It was overwhelming and scary, but at the same time I felt elated, kind of like the first time I had an ejaculation. That feeling that your whole body is going into an electrical spasm, and for a split second you think it's too much and that you're not going to be able to withstand it, but also at the same time you like it and feel charged by it. So at this point, I start laughing (both in reality, and in my mental world), and in the real world I try to get up from the bed and reach towards the computer (in reality I had simply been laying there the whole time), and in my mental world I jump from the wheel and run to hug/wrestle with the pillar of music/water. That seemed to relieve some tension. I also at this time realized that it was Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 that I was listening to, and that I had selected it, and I was thinking to myself "This is way too overwhelming, I should have picked something else...I just need to hold on a little longer, it's almost going to be over." Apparently my friends directed me back onto the bed at this point, and were laughing along with me (I was laughing, and I even kinda remember laughing, even though I felt half-terrified inside. At the time it felt like a release of tension, of the sense of everything being so overwhelming, and a recognition that "I'm not in control yet, I just have to lay back and take it easy and ride it out.) In my mind, I see my friends again, and I think that I am trying to excuse my behavior (my trying to scale the imaginary wheel) and reassure them that I'm okay. Things start to seem real again. I stop paying attention to the wheel and the water, and when I glance back, they are no longer there. The music no longer produces a physical sensation, but just sounds like music again.

Suddenly I had the 3rd burst of revelation (going to the 4th and final plane of existence, real reality), and this one felt like waking up from a dream within a dream. (Like, the previous coming back to reality had been not entirely real, like how when you wake up in a dream, and then wake up again and realize that you had just woken up into another dream). I had some minor doubts that *this* was finally the real reality, but it seemed like it was, and it was, as a matter of fact. I saw that I was in bed, rather than standing up and talking to my friends, and my first thought was a sense of relief, a thought of "Oh good, I wasn't really standing up and interacting with imaginary things and saying weird things to my friends and stuff. I had just imagined that." At this point I could move around and sort of talk again, but the feeling of weirdness was still there, and all I could say was, "Holy shit! Mindfuck! Man, aw fuck!! That was crazy!" Now, as the previous terror subsided (the shock and terror of being suddenly thrust into new planes of brutal existence and going basically from age 1 to age 21 in 3 minutes), I now had a feeling of superego-fear and paranoia that this feeling of "weirdness" would never go away, and that I'd have to write papers and go to class and live the rest of my life in this real, yet weird state with this lingering disorienting dreaminess. That fear lasted a few minutes. I was suddenly pretty thirsty, and I could still taste the Salvia in my mouth, and I had this idea that it might help get it out of my system more quickly by getting that taste out of my mouth, so I drank some water, and sat down and started to try to explain some of this experience to my friend, just as, meanwhile, the other friend was firing his experience up. I remember thinking, unsettled/distressed, "Noooo!!!! What is he doing???!! He doesn't know what's about to happen! He's not ready!"

I went on discussing my experience in a soft voice, so as to not disturb my friend's experience (although he apparently did hear some of what I was saying because his experience was structured by a wheel as well, just as I was talking about my wheel experience to my friend. Oops, sorry! (But I had to vent at least some of what I had experienced. There was no way I could keep this to myself. If my friend had wanted an undisturbed experience, it might have worked better if he had waited just a bit longer until I had told some of my experience and come totally down from it. Anyways, if you are reading this, sorry for the interference!).

So, anyways, after a few more minutes, that sense of paranoia went away, and I felt like my old self again, and I felt relieved, and now a little cleansed by the whole experience. I guess you could call this the "5th level," real reality without any lingering weirdness or paranoia. But it wasn't realized by any sudden transition, but just a gradual, but very distinct shaking off of a weird feeling.

All of what I have described took place in about 10 minutes. It felt muuuuuuch longer than that, but that's not to say that things were happening any less rapidly. They were still rapid and overwhelming. It was just so much stuff crammed into that window of subjective experience, even if that subjective experience seemed to last longer and seemed like it should have allowed for more stuff than the time duration of real reality. But maybe this longer subjective duration was an illusion created by precisely the fact that there was so much stuff going on. I don't know.

I continued to be very talkative for the rest of the night, trying to convey a fraction of what had befallen me.

I slept very well last night/this morning and woke up feeling pretty sharp.

Will I ever do Salvia again? Probably not. Do I recommend Salvia? I think this account speaks for itself. If it intrigues you, and you want to take the plunge, then go for it. But be warned that, as far as I can tell, there's no way to fully prepare for it and stay fully in control during a "breakthrough." You might set up a nice setting and whatnot, and you might remind yourself beforehand that, for example, "Satan doesn't exist, don't get freaked out if he shows up," and that might guide your brain's innermost, non-conscious processes to give you a gentler experience, but if Satan actually does show up, that reminder will be worth jack squat because you won't be the same person who went into this experience confident that Satan would not trip you up. Your real life could possibly be all out of touch from you, and you won't know that this thing in front of you doesn't really exist. Now that I realize things like this, is this one reason why I probably won't ever do Salvia ever again. If I got half-terrified at points during my thematically-neutral trip, I can only imagine what it would be like to experience the 2nd level (ego without a life history or outside knowledge) with a malevolent theme. The 1st level might not be too bad, because you wouldn't be able to make sense of fear, evil, potential for harm, etc. anyways, and the 3rd level might be a little scary, but you could always remind yourself that it's just a hallucination. But in the 2nd level, you'd never know, and you'd be to the point where you are attuned to its malevolent meaning.

That said, even if you meet Satan, it's only like 3 minutes of Satan (although it could feel longer...but it will have an end (although you won't know that in the moment, but meh...) And there's also the potential for very thematically-positive experiences, like, for the Mazatec Indians, meeting the Virgin Mary. And there are probably ways to prep your subconscious mind for that. In any case, maybe it's like one of those things that everyone should do once, just because the pontential for bad is finite, but the wonder and reflection of it all will stay with you for a long time afterwards. (It's by no means a recreational drug. It's more like making yourself into a research lab and performing a mental/psychological/philosophical experiment on yourself). I do see diminishing returns from having any more than one "breakthrough," though, which is why I probably won't be doing it again, even though I found this trip worthwhile.

===================

Addendum:

Here are many reflections on my experience and its philosophical/psychological implications:

Hmmm, after thinking it over a little more, it seems the issue of ideal forms might be a little more complicated than I first presumed.

Consider that I already could recognize the wheel *as* a wheel, with wheel-like characteristics (roundness, rotation), without having experienced other wheels from which to make this generalization. How could I have distinguished the outlines of wheelness or of the wheel-like object without having previously seen wheels? Where did the concept of the "game" come from? Were empiricial experiences and conceptualizations from my real life filtering back into this trip, somehow subconsciously, unbeknownst to me at the time? Even during the 1st stage, I came ready-made with the capability (but not the awareness) of climbing. How had I acquired that capability? (Perhaps now you can see how this can be such a mindfuck).

======

Hmmm, I've thought about the ideal forms a bit more, and considering that they slid back into place at the same time as the ego, that suggests that one is not dependent on the other, but rather that they are co-incident, and that perhaps the ego itself is an artificially constructed ideal form, created by our minds as a shorthand for keeping track of our complex organism's actions and for providing continuity in this.

After all, Plato's ideal forms were concerned with explaining how particulars can be grouped into universals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
If you think about the Ship of Theseus paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_paradox
you realize that we are not really the same material entity, moment to moment. We are physically changing, our cells are replacing themselves. Our material being at one moment is a particular than can not easily be equated with our being at another moment, at least not without resorting to the universal, the ideal form, of the ego. Without the ideal form of ego, we might not be able to bridge this change with a sensation of continuity. So perhaps the ego is a brain module that has been selected for by evolution in the higher-order animals in order to facilitate continuity of thought and perception, so that learning and planning behaviors can be undertaken and so that the animal can perform the behaviors it needs to do in order to survive. Whereas less complex animals might not have this brain module. If fish (or other less complex animals) really do only have a memory of like 7 seconds (such that they basically "begin their lives over again each 7 seconds"), or if they can only respond to immediate stimuli, then this might explain, psychologically, how this might work and what that might feel like for them.

Which makes me think, it's possible that my Trieb state was slightly longer than I remember, but perhaps the parts farther back were forgotten (perhaps that explains the vague, unsubstantial phase that I experienced immediately before that). Indeed, it has seemed a bit of a mystery to me that I was able to remember anything from this state, seeing as I had no way to keep myself continuously reminded of it or conscious of it as it was happening. Perhaps the only reason I was able to remember it was because it was immediately followed by an ego state where I was able to quickly reflect on it.

========

Perhaps that also explains the feeling of time travel or actually reliving those moments of Trieb-state when remembering them from the ego state. Perhaps it was because it was the first point when I, as a conscious ego, was living those experiences.

Even more radically, perhaps what I remember as the Trieb state was not actually the Trieb state itself, but the first stirrings of my ego immediately reflecting on my Trieb state, trying to catch up, as it were (because apparently (I read this in a youtube comment, so I have no idea if this is true) Salvinorin A, the psychoactive ingredient in Salvia, works on the kappa-opioid receptors, which which causes the brain to not receive all of the essential signals and "micro-stutter," sort of like lag in a computer, giving the brain several options: either try to retransmit the data, or skip the data. So it was probably, at first, just skipping a lot of data, and perhaps the step where the brain's processor writes the data to its RAM was initially interfered with, or skipped, but then once these circuits started becoming operational again, the brain had to catch up on some of this data (thereby, in a sense, reliving it)), and then perhaps the real feeling of revelation came when the ego ran out of lagged data to re-process, and discovered that it could take in new data and reflect on it in real time.

But I think the time travel meant that I was experiencing the moments twice, both in the Trieb state, and in the ego state. Or perhaps twice in the ego state, once in an automatic reprocessing sort of way, and after the revelation of being able to consciously manipulate new data (instead of just consciously record it), I went back in my ego again and this time reflected on the Trieb data consciously, and perhaps it only felt like time travel because my attention was focused. Who knows? There are many possibilities.

===========

From wikipedia:

"The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification."

No, this is just plain wrong. Drive does not seek pleasure. Drive is its own justification, or rather, outside of the need for any instrumental justification. That's what's meant by "drive," it just drives you. It does not stop and reflect on pleasure. The Id does not seek pleasure--it's the ego that seeks pleasure. After all, why would Trieb seek pleasure? It would do it no good. What is the function of pleasure? Is it not so that you think, "Oh, this felt good, I want to do it again," or "Oh, this felt bad, I want to avoid it in the future."? But how would this function if you don't have an ego that can register concepts such as "pleasure, " "good," "bad," and that can remember things as a continuous "I" into the future? The Id just takes a summary of the body's state and the sensory stimuli at any given moment, and reflexively, and un-reflectively, responds to that stimuli in a quasi-robotic, quasi-programmed way. The Id cannot remember pleasurable experiences from the past--it cannot even register what a pleasurable experience is. At least, that is my experience.

"The Ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bringing grief."

I would put it somewhat differently. Rather, the Id does not seek things for pleasure--its is not instrumental and reflective in this respect, but direct. It directly seeks the things it is programmed by instinct to seek. The ego is then subservient to this Id and is programmed to identify itself with the Id's drives and derive pleasure from figuring out clever, longer-term ways to accomplish the Id's drives.

Which raises an interesting possibility: an ego that refuses to be subservient to the Id, but rather, finds other ways of obtaining pleasure. This would mean that we would lose pleasure from eating, sleeping, watching out instinctually from our social standing, etc. In other words, we would no longer be looking out for our biological being, unless we saw an abstract, ego-centered reason for doing so. It would mean the ruin of our "normal" lives and possibly the end of our life itself. It would manifest itself as something incredibly pathological---like someone obsessed with music or philosophy who didn't care to eat or sleep or drink. There are a million different ways that this could manifest itself---its limits being determined only by the inventiveness of the ego.

For this reason, I would have to conclude that the Id is not something to be struggled with or opposed (as is commonly assumed, especially in our post-Victorian culture), but rather, you'd do well to hope that you really did have an assertive Id that was driving your ego, and that this connection was solid.

============

So, because it is the exercise of the ego in the service of the Id that produces pleasure, we can imagine situations where the Id is satisfied (we obtain food, sleep, etc), but where our ego is not necessary for obtaining these and is not exercised, and therefore we experience no pleasure from satisfying our drives in this way.

What am I saying? We do not need to "imagine" such situations--they already exist in abundance around us. Industrial capitalism, paradoxically both the wealthiest and the most miserable epoch of humanity to-date, is very good at producing goods to satisfy drives, but very poor at exercising the ego in this endeavor. This explains why working at a mindless job is unfulfilling. One might think, "Oh, but you are earning money to buy food and a place to live. You are living the good life. Why can't you enjoy that?" It's because the ego was not exercised in the attainment of these drives.

Games are a way of the ego inventing challenge for itself so that it can exercise itself in the service of the Id. For example, imagine you have a grand table of food presented in front of you. All you have to do is walk over to the table and start eating. But there's no strategy involved, no exercise of the ego. So the ego says to itself, "Hey, let's say I have to do 2 cartwheels and count to 100 in German before I can have that food." Then you do the game, you feel a sense of accomplishment, and the food actually tastes pleasurable. (Whereas, otherwise, even the tastiest food might have tasted tasteless).

Remember that, during my 2nd level, I continued climbing the wheel, but it became a game. At first I was confused by this because I assumed that games would be caused by the ego evaluating itself against a standard set by a superego, and "winning the game" meant fulfilling the expectations of the superego. And, remember, that the superego didn't make its return until the 3rd level. But no, genuine *fun* games have nothing to do with the superego, but rather the Id. Indeed, a game is apt to become most unfun the minute it is turned into a superego injuction.

In any case, even Id-directed games are not an entirely wholesome fix. They entail the ego lying to itself---they entail ego irrationality. It is possible that the habit of judging irrationally with the ego could be deeply corrosive to the ego's ability to understand and analyze reality, which is the ego's essential function. Another reason games are also probably never a total substitute for the real thing is because there's always probably a portion of the ego that knows all along that it's a game. I doubt the ego can truly trick itself totally in this respect. Nevertheless, inventing games to satisfy the ego is probably better than having no ego satisfaction at all. Games are a coping mechanism.

Games are also a symptom of the real, fundamental problem: the lack of an environment that naturally exercises the ego, where drives are challenging to achieve but obtainable.

This does not entail an opposition to progress, to increasing one's (or a society's) productivity. In doing activity that increases the productivity of society, the ego will feel very satisfied from doing productive, strategic, clever work in order to better ensure the attainment of drives in the future. It will be able to reflect on its past efforts and feel satisfaction, recognizing the connection between its past efforts and the current satisfaction of the Id. (This, by the way, suggests a solid psychological reason for why "alienation" in the labor process feels unpleasant. You need to be able to consciously recognize the connection between the ego's efforts and the Id's satisfaction.)

What this does suggest about progress, however, is that it must be tangibly connected to one's efforts (so, for example, (and actual case studies bear this out), winning the lottery will not make you happy, unless your ego invested a lot of strategy and expectation on it--which is no more of a prudent course of action because one is likely to fail at this and waste all of this investment and demoralize the ego, more often than not.)

============

The type of progress that is not apt to be satisfying to the ego is the type where, either, things keep on getting better without your input, or where you quit trying to progress and just decide that you've achieved enough progress, and now you can just sit back forever and let the fruits roll in. In the latter case, you will initially still feel satisfaction, but after a while, unless the maintenance of your level of progress comes to require the exercise of your ego, you will cease to derive pleasure from your steady-state. I fear that this is the situation of the advanced capitalist countries---if we wanted to, we could mostly stop working and satisfy our desires thanks to our current, stagnant level of productivity. The only way to employ our egos, aside from inventing countless games (which we do as well), is to strive for ever-higher levels of productivity. At some point, we will reach a physical resource ceiling on that. And what then???

Note: This also explains why unemployment-as-such, and also underemployment and employment that is perceived as pointless, are felt to be pernicious and deadening and depressing. But nor is it enough to give someone a contrived job of shuffling papers from one pile to the other and back again. The job has to be visibly, tangibly, consciously connected to the satisfaction of the person's Id. (If a task cannot help but be complex and many-sequenced, then perhaps helping a person's rational mind understand the role of his/her task in the broader production process would be sufficient for making the ego feel like it is usefully serving the Id.)

So, to consider an actual example, let's look at me: I'm doing lots of productive schoolwork (I'm certainly not living in complete sloth), so my ego should feel exercised and satisfied, right?

Well, the first problem is that, except for rare papers that I write that have a personal connection (such as if they have political or philosophical significance that I care about), I don't visibly recognize how my ego's efforts on those papers satisfy my drives (and it's possible that they actually don't satisfy my drives at all, even indirectly), whereas if the paper addresses come political theme, I can understand how, indirectly, that helps bolster the political project, which might eventually help me.

Ordinarily, if I didn't recognize the tangible way in which an activity of my ego was serving my Id, then my ego would not feel compelled to do the activity. I'd procrastinate and not feel like doing it. And this is indeed what happens, until...

The superego intervenes, forcing my ego to do the activity. The ego is now working to serve the superego with this task, not the Id, so the ego derives none of the satisfaction from the activity, only the relief of having temporarily escaped the roving gaze of the superego yet again.

The model hitherto postulated has been that the ego, in its normal, healthy state, must serve both the Id and the superego at the same time. I'm starting to think that this is actually a pathological state, rooted in our particular class society.

What I imagine is a different arrangement: the superego serving the ego, and the ego serving the Id. The superego can do much productive work in this regard. The ego cannot easily comprehend what other people in society are thinking or expecting---the ego is inherently self-centered, and this is appropriate for its role. But the ego does need to know this information about other people's mental states and social expectations, one way or the other, in order to perform rationally in a social context (and human beings are the most social animals of all). That's where the superego comes in. (Likewise, other social animals, such as dogs, probably have a well-developed superego as well, which maybe partly explains their extraordinary ability to read the emotions of other dogs and even humans across the species barrier! You can see the dog's superego at work whenever they exhibit the guilty, sulking face and whatnot.)

This is now my contention: in its healthy state, the superego is no more than an empathy-generator. It gives the ego a sense of what other people are thinking and feeling and expecting. It does this indirectly by making us feel the effect of morality, or what we might call a "conscience." If our ego is not trained to be skeptical, if our ego is used to being submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret this morality or conscience as an absolute injunction given by an absolute, omnipotent authority. But if our ego is trained in skepticism, and it is not pathologically submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret the superego's injunction as advice based on the superego's empathetic reading of the other complex, sentient beings with which one is interacting. (Non-sentient beings are less complex, and are easy enough to understand as mechanical forces for the ego to account for them).

The alert, skeptical, insightful ego can rationally weigh the options: for example, would I more effectively serve the Id by stealing this piece of food from my friend, or is that friend likely to react in a way that harms my overall ability to serve the Id in the future? If the superego detects that the friend will be mean and angry towards you anyways, your superego might present your ego with a feeling of disdain or hatred or envy, and you might be tempted to take the food anyways. If the superego judges that the other person has a mental state/constitution that will be conducive to mutual cooperation, the superego will serve the ego with a feeling of deep affection and bonding, and you will not judge it wise to steal the food.

How does the ego become submissive to the superego, and how does the ego become infected with fear of the superego? I'm not quite sure, but perhaps it has something to do with:
1. The advent of transcendent Gods. Your superego tries to figure out this infinitely powerful member of your sociality (that could potentially inflict severe pain on you), and the superego can't figure this God out since this God is held to be transcendence and unknowable. And so the superego becomes infected with fear, and the ego looks to the superego for guidance, but receives none, except a vague feeling of fear, and the ego keeps on looking back on and on ever more urgently, but all it receives is a feeling of fear, and pretty soon the ego becomes obsessed with figuring out the source of this fear, and it becomes fixated on the superego???

(Whereas a superego might be able to cope with an anthropomorphic God with anthropomorphic finiteness and faults and personality and whatnot...and when it comes to animistic, quasi-mechanical Gods, maybe even the plain-old ego would be suited for it. At the worst, placating an animistic god with rituals would be like having the ego invent a game for itself: "Okay, this field won't produce a harvest unless I sacrifice a goat to this God...okay, now I've accomplished that, I feel satisfied, now we have the god's favor (and we think we know this with certainty because it is held to be an animistic/mechanical/quasi-naturalistic god), and it will just depend on the rain to see if we get a good harvest.")

2. Child-parent relationships. At first, the child's relationship to the parent is likely to be like the human's relationship to an incomprehensible god, so maybe a certain amount of chronic fear and suprego fixation is unavoidable at a certain age. But, assuming nothing traumatic happens, the child grows up to possess the hallmark of adulthood--a calm and collected superego that serves the ego, instead of a fearful ego that serves a fearful superego.

3. Powerful leaders/states/groups in human society. When leaders/groups become powerful enough, they can act with irrational impunity, leading to a situation that closely models the previous two examples.

These are just some ideas. I'm really not sure at all (well, I'm not sure about any of this, but especially this part).

BTW, I think #3 suggests the psychological basis for anarchism. It is possible that anarchism (along with atheism and non-patriarchical family relations) are essential for our mental well-being.

So is it possible that monotheistic, transcendental religion has been nothing more than the world's greatest method of ego-effort-redirection (redirecting our ego's efforts from serving our Id, to serving some superego or God or ruler or set of clergy, etc.)? Furthermore, a method that co-opted natural animistic/pagan impulses, as well as the superego, in order to distort these two potentially useful devices into a tool of ego-effort-redirection and exploitation?

Just think about how, in today's world,

instead of superego --> ego --> Id,

we have our egos choose to sabotage our Id with sleep depression, anorexia, monastic celibacy (less so nowadays), etc., all in order to serve the superego or some God or ruler, with very little if any benefit coming back to our Id in the end (and even if some does come back, our ego is not aware of it and so cannot take joy in it).

So the question becomes, how to get the superego serving the ego once again? I think a good start would be to interrogate the superego in terms of its instrumental usefulness to the ego every single time you feel an injuction from the superego that you "should" do something.

Superego: "You should pray to God daily."
Ego: "How does that serve me?"
Superego: "You're missing the point. You should love God just for goodness sake!"
Ego: "Sorry, I'm not going to do anything unless I can see how it at least indirectly serves my mission of serving the Id."
Superego: "Oh, fine...well, you see, God will make you burn in hell if you don't."
Ego: "Why would he do that? And how do I know he really exists?"
Superego: "The mind and substance of God is unknowable!"
Ego: "Well, sheesh, a lot of help you are...why am I even listening to you anyways if you can't do your job of translating to me, in a language and system of incentives and feelings that I can understand, what other entities are thinking and what it would be rational for me to do about it? I'm going to ignore you whenever you are not providing me with some comprehensible insight...but insofar as you explain yourself, I will take your explanations into account."

Most people currently have this idea that the superego is naturally irrational. I think a hijacked, obfuscated superego can be irrational, but an effective superego should at least make intuitive sense and also be able to be interrogated by the ego. In principle, the ego could find out everything about other people's mental states that the superego can, but it would take much longer for the ego's analytical, reductionist methods to come to any conclusions, whereas the superego can obtain reasonably accurate conclusions using shorthand rules-of-thumb (which are probably partly programmed from evolution and thus partly innate), as long as the superego is not used to address questions for which it is not suited, such as probing the mind of a transcendental God and taking account of that God's potential effects. This suggests that it is not useful or advisable to try to extend morality, which is a product of the superego, to encompass the transcendental and divine absolute. Rather, feelings of morality are to be heeded only when they apply to mundane interactions between people. And we should occasionally interrogate this morality with egoistic rationality, just to let our egos make sure that our superegos have not been supplying bat-shit-insane rules of thumb, or rules-of-thumb for social conduct that are horribly obsolete now that we have moved out of our recent evolutionary context (paleolithic clan living).

So, there are actually two distinct kinds of irrationality: Id-irrationality and superego-irrationality. (Or rather, we should speak of "Id-nonrationality," because the Id has no self-evaluation along that scale. It has its own, self-justifying, given logic that has to do with our innate drives that are, presumably unchanging from our birth--the most basic aspects of survival and reproduction).

So, declaring "I desire X (not instrumentally in order to achieve something else, but rather, directly, for its own sake)," such as food, water, sleep, etc...that is Id-nonrationality. Equally, "I do not desire X" (directly, not for instrumental reasons (if it's for instrumental reasons, then you know it's the ego that is saying that). This is the sort of irrationality or non-rationality that we might as well accept or even celebrate. So, if you are sexually aroused by men and you desire sex with them in a direct way, for its own sake, (not for instrumental, strategic, ego-driven reasons), well, that's your Id talking, so you might as well embrace that nonrational desire and set your ego to the task of figuring out how to fulfill it.

This is completely different than "I *should* desire X" or "I *should not* desire X. That's your superego talking. If we happen to interrogate this statement with our ego and find that it has no reason behind it, that it is irrational, then we would do well to discard the superego's advice in this circumstance and not allow ourselves to be troubled by its remonstrances. So we hear "I *should not* desire sex with men." Our ego asks itself, "Why? How would that harm me and my quest for gaining pleasure through serving my Id, which very much has a drive to have sex with men?" If the ego or superego can't respond with reasons, then this injuction must be discarded. A helpful superego would respond with, "Well, most other people in our society don't like homosexual sex. I mean, trust me, they reeeeeeeaaaaally don't like other people having homosexual sex, for various reasons, and they will do much harm to you (and thus prevent the Id from pursuing its other Drives) if you try it." The rational ego would then weigh these consequences, and either go ahead with the sex if it deemed the rewards greater than the risks, or if not, then possibly figure out some of the reasons why those people don't like homosexuals having sex, figure out of there's some way to change that (which would mean having another dialog with the superego and investigating its sense of morality). Or, if the ego recognized that there were other, more urgent Drives of the Id to satisfy, then the ego would set about on some new task and just drop the whole intention of having homosexual sex for the time being.

So, notice, aside from prohibiting things, the superego can equally say, "You *should* desire X." I think this is the heart of the problem that Zizek talks about, where the new psychological problem of post-modern capitalism is the superego injunction to "enjoy." No, "enjoying" will not feel enjoyable unless it is done as the ego serving the Id (rather than the ego serving the superego).

Perhaps this suggests the psychological basis of that feeling that we call "freedom." Perhaps it is the sensation of being able to cleverly and strategically exercise the full powers of one's ego (which is empowered, but not determined, by the superego's advice) in order to serve one's Id Drives.

Finally, I feel like I have resolved a philosophical issue that has been tormenting me for this whole school year. I was continually sensing an affinity for irrationality in some circumstances, but a complete opposite revulsion towards irrationality in other circumstances. I felt myself becoming rootless, not knowing how to operate---concluding to myself that ultra-rationality was the only advisable way, but at the same time practicing certain daily irrationalities out of habit and intuitive choice. Now I understand that there are some irrationalities that I can wholeheartedly pursue, that will not lead me astray from happiness, namely the Id-irrationalities, and that there are, indeed, irrationalities that will harm my happiness and that I would do well to resolve with my completely rational, egoistic ego (just as it normally should be).

So, love is irrational, right? But now I know that expressing "I love you" (as simply a gleeful expression, without any egoistic, manipulative, strategic, instrumental intent) is fine. Whereas, thinking "I know I *should* love you...but why don't I? What is wrong with me?" is problematic, unless the ego can find a very good instrumental reason for taking this attitude.

Likewise, irrational organicism that one directly feels and pursues is fine. (Example: "I feel a direct (non-instrumental) Drive or desire to immerse myself in the organic wholesomeness of the outdoor beauty of the Ozarks.") Organicism that one seeks for instrumental, egoistic reasons could also be fine, so long as this is rational organicism. (Example: "Going 'back to the Land in my Heimat, the Ozarks, will clear my mind, improve my eating habits and health, and help me finish this research paper, which in turn will help me serve my Id's Drives by getting me a future job, future employment, and money"). Whereas irrational organicism that one feels a superego injunction to possess, or irrational organicism that has irrational moral implications, will be problematic. (Example: "I should feel love for my Ozark Heimat, and so should all others, or else they are untermensch and should be killed.")

===================

Ah, if only we were still forced to hunt wild deer for food in order to survive, we could know the true satisfaction of satisfying our hunger thanks to the brilliant cleverness of our rational ego.

(Whereas modern deer hunting is a type of game where our ego has to trick itself into thinking that this hunting is actually necessary to obtain the meat...even when done with bow-and-arrow...actually, especially when done with bow-and-arrow, because that requires the added self-trickery of imagining that one doesn't have any better tools that one could use. At least when you use a rifle, you are being honest to yourself about that...although the sport or gamesmanship of it is lessened because of that. Really, the more you try to go back to that primitive life, the more of a game of self-trickery it is. That's another reason why I really wonder about the efficacy of "going back to the land" with some sort of commune or something. Unless we could make it productive in a practical way, I fear that we'd always have this nagging feeling in us that the only reason we were able to do this is because we live in an industrial society of abundance, and that our happiness didn't really depend on our efforts on the land, and that we could leave it any time we wanted, such that it would take self-trickery to convince ourselves that it was a meaningful endeavor. Don't get me wrong, it would indeed be pleasant. But it would also need to require the cleverness and constructiveness of our egos in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps fixing up a house would fulfill that requirement.

Even so, there's no way to really go back to that primitive, precarious, troubled, and yet acutely satisfying way of life (living off the fruits of a farm and not begrudging it with the thought that you could be doing all these other things in the city) without doing away with modern society entirely, and I do not think that would be worth it. I continue to hold out hope that we can find additional ways of satisfying our egos in modern, industrial, information society. We just need to make a few modifications to our lifestyles, our culture, and our political and social systems.)