The Salvia Blog

As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in self-exploration. When I was a kid in high school, I smoked a lot of pot, as did many of my classmates. Then one fateful day at a Grateful Dead concert in Las Vegas (thinking back, I still can’t believe my parents let me go), I discovered LSD. I remember discovering how LSD wasn’t a drug like marijuana. While marijuana got me “high,” LSD altered my perception of reality. It wasn’t like anything I had ever experienced. As I write, I have a clear vision of what that altered reality looked and felt like, but I don’t know if it’s anything I can ever describe accurately in words. Some are able to describe their psychedelic experiences through simple tangible hallucinations, as I have experienced at times. Like seeing mountains melt into the ground, watching stationary objects move, looking up at a sky full of objects that aren’t really there, or one of my favorites, seeing one of my friends once walk into the room without his head on.

But often on psychedelic drugs like LSD, reality is just experienced in an altered way that is difficult (maybe impossible) to describe in words, or based on simple tangible perceptions. I think it’s difficult to understand if you’ve never taken psychedelic drugs what this altered reality is like. But if you have taken them, you probably understand exactly what I’m talking about right now.

It had been years since I’d taken any psychedelic drugs (maybe even decades), when I first took Salvia some months ago. And I entered the first alternate reality experience I had encountered in many many years. My tangible experience was a lucid hallucination. My body melted into the couch I was sitting on, then became absorbed by the coffee table in front of me, then my body was engulfed by the plasma screen television on the other end of the room. All these things were happening simultaneously, and there was no sense of time. All the while I was sitting back on my friend’s couch motionless (as I discovered later).

Rediscovering the Alternate Reality

As the peak of the drug experience wore off (the peak only lasted about five or ten minutes), though I was no longer experiencing extreme alterations of reality, I had a different sense about my reality. For one thing, I felt a heightened sense of euphoria (which interestingly only seemed to wear off very slowly over the course of the day). But mainly I felt a sense of an alternate reality existing among the one that we walk amongst and perceive every day. It was almost like I had been reminded of the alternate reality that I had experienced frequently so many years earlier on drugs like LSD and mushrooms. It was as if it been there all along, and I was simply revisiting it.

Maybe most importantly, there had been a metaphysical or spiritual aspect to the experience. In the peak of the experience, there was no division between myself and the objects around me. There was no clear division between myself and the coffee table, or the coffee table and the television, or myself and the television. I was experiencing a sort of interconnectedness of all things.

Now remember, I never would have been able to describe my experience in any of these terms while I was in the experience. During the experience, I simply was the experience, there were no words to describe it, no thoughts to understand it. It is only afterwards that I am able to come up with tangible references (like melting into the couch), to describe the alternate reality experience. This is why the actual experience of an alternate reality experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs can never truly be explained in words. People come out of psychedelic journeys with stories of visions and hallucinations, but those things are really just aspects or results of a much larger alteration of reality, or things that happened within the context of an altered reality which itself can’t be described in any words.

I believe the nature of that altered state of reality is an amazing playground for exploration of the self, and exploration of the nature of reality. So I am launching this blog as a place to share my explorations of my alternate reality experiences in writing, and also to allow me to further explore the experiences themselves.

Is there an ultimate reality?

Scientists will tell us that we are constantly exchanging molecules with the objects and the environment around us. And that at the core of the atoms and molecules that make us up is mere nothingness. Maybe this nothingness, and this interconnectedness of all things that science points to is the “true” reality if there is such thing as a “true” reality. If so, then maybe the alternate (and interconnected) reality that myself and many others have experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs is in fact a more accurate rendition of reality than the reality that many of us spend most of our lives entrenched in.

Understanding the nature of self through psychedelic drug use

In tandem with the alternate reality experience that goes along with psychedelic drug use, the most interesting thing to me has always been the alternate perception of self that they have given me. My perception of reality is altered on psychedelic drugs, and along with that, my perception of myself is also altered. For me, and many others, this leads to great awakenings in the definition and experience of what one perceives to be one’s “self.” These alterations in the way I perceive reality and myself have led me to have experiences under psychedelic drugs of what has felt like seeing and awakening to my “true self.”

Maybe it’s that from the context of a different sense of self, one is able to look back on one’s normal state of self, and see things that it is impossible to see from within that “normal” sense of self.

Taking a “trip”

It’s as simple as growing up and living your whole life in a small town, then taking a trip overseas for the first time. The usual experience is waking up to all kinds of things about the life you had been living back home that you never realized because you were so immersed in the life you had been living since you were born. It was essentially all you had ever known, until you had the opportunity to see something else.

For many of us, one sense of self is all we ever know. However, by temporarily leaving our traditional sense of self through the use of psychedelic drugs, I believe we are able to come to understand things about our “default” sense of self that we could never have seen from within our traditional experience of self. We are also able to gain access to realms of being that are inaccessible from our normal state of self.

Basically, psychedelic drugs provide the opportunity to travel away from the proverbial small town of our traditional sense of self into what is possibly a wider world of universal consciousness.

Hello, Salvia

These explorations of my own consciousness and my perception of myself were journeys I enjoyed taking when I was younger, carefree, and could spend all weekend running around the parking lots of Grateful Dead concerts without a worry in the world.

Slightly later in life now though, with some (albeit few) responsibilities under my belt, the idea of tripping out on LSD for half a day seems ever so slightly worrying.

But when my friend first told me about the psychedelic properties of Salvia, and the fact that the effects only lasted a few minutes, I was all reared up to reenter psychedelic land.

From my first experience, I discovered that even though the effects of Salvia only lasted a few minutes to a half an hour, that it provided me with some of the same kinds of insights into the essence of my self that psychedelic drugs that often lasted many hours had provided me with years ago.

And so began my experimentation with Salvia Divinorum.

And the creation of The Salvia Blog.

I hope you enjoy the explorations I’m going to share on these pages as much as I do.

Most recently, I have been struggling to overcome some anxiety, and minor depression. Some of which is related to events of my childhood, and some of which is simply related to chemical imbalances. I have gone on medication to rectify some of the chemical aspect of my experience, and am in therapy to help resolve some of the scarring that resulted from certain events of my childhood.

Like I said in my previous post, I haven’t had experiences with psychedelic drugs in many many years. I’ve often thought I’d like to do them again, but I didn’t like the idea of being under their influence for half a day. It was one thing when I was a teenager and didn’t think much about what I was doing. It’s kind of a different thing now as a “grown up.”

But when I first heart about Salvia, the idea of a psychedelic drug that only lasted a few minutes hugely appealed to me.

So, recently I have begun experimenting with Salvia. Just about every time I’ve taken Salvia, I have attained new insight into myself, including enabling me to essentially begin separating myself from the depression and anxiety I have been struggling to overcome in therapy.

My first solo Salvia flight

I have taken Salvia with friends a few times, and mostly just all laughed our heads off at the ridiculous things that would happen, like the room rotating, or people melting into each other. But I took it on my own earlier this week, and simply sat in silence with my experience.

I laid back with my eyes closed, and in a matter of seconds, it was as if I slipped into an alternate reality. I felt like I was a part of the objects around me. There was no division between me and other things. It was almost like “I” didn’t exist. There was no me and then other things. I was just a part of everything else, and everything was a part of me. But here I’m trying to put a sensory experience into words. I experienced it as a sensation and an awareness. It’s like trying to explain happiness to someone who has never been happy. You can describe some of the things you might do or say when you’re happy, but you couldn’t actually explain the actual emotion. The same applies to this experience.

The Three Selves Within

But as the initial experience began to wear off, I had a powerful sense of self experience (still lying back with my eyes closed), that I can describe in words.

I experienced myself for the first time in a while as a completely pure version of myself. No scarring, no anxiety, no depression. It was almost as if I were able to see a true and authentic version of myself.

But in seeing this version of myself I also saw another version of myself, the version of myself that had been showing up in the world recently, and this other version was different than the pure version I saw of myself. This version was insecure, unsure of himself, awkward, uncomfortable around people. While the first version I had seen was none of those things. The first self seemed like the true essence of me. The second self seemed like a product of things like scarring and chemical anxiety.

What was interesting was that I experienced these two selves as two distinctly different entities.

But shortly after becoming aware of these two selves, I moved into another observation. I became aware of the self that was watching these other two selves.

And I went into a moment of trying to determine who this self was that was observing the two other selves. I became confused. Who was I in this moment as the observer? Was I one of the selves sitting back doing the observing, while simultaneously being observed? In which case, was I the pure self? Or was I the wounded awkward insecure self doing the observing? Or was I a mixture of the two selves? Or was I a third self independent of the other two selves? Was I, in that capacity, simply an observer self? Was it possible that neither of the two selves I saw in front of me was in fact my true essence, and that the one that was now sitting back and doing the observing was in fact my true essence? And now as I write, I realize that there must have been another self that had begun observing even the observer self. Maybe it is possible that we can keep stepping back into new levels of awareness of the self.

But what was most profound and most beneficial for me was to see the clear distinction between what I’ll call the “pure” self, and what I’ll call the “wounded” self. I had never experienced them before as two distinctly different entities as clearly defined as I did in this experience.

Months of therapy hadn’t shown me this distinction as clearly as I saw it in that moment.

It made me begin to wonder if the “wounded” self can be so distinctly separated from the “true” self (as was the case in my experience), then what types of other more effective ways could there be for overcoming past trauma than traditional therapy? Could psychedelic drugs, like Salvia, be part of a method to break the connection to a wounded self, and help one reconnect with their true inner self?

I’ve continued to take Salvia the couple of nights since then. When I smoke the Salvia, after coming down from the initial experience, I come into a sense of myself devoid of anxiety and depression. I come into a sense of what feels like my natural essence.

I’m going to be careful to try and notice any side-effects that smoking the Salvia has, and I’m going to continue my experimentation, continue writing and posting here, and see where this little exploration takes me.