This comes from a some crazy and sick mofo I call a friend….

He loves his Salvia plants - Personally, I have never tried it, it scares the shit out of me, I like my mind in tact.

Witchcraft in the USA Today?

Only in the minds of those who wish to stamp it out. You see, no real witchcraft exists other than in the crazed imaginings of a few who are…. A- stupid enough to think they are witches…and B- stupid enough to think they need to fight witches.

The real witchcraft exists in the minds of those who think they can see it out there in our society and feel the call to stamp it out. And since there is no real witchcraft to “fight” they need to make some up.

Like the Salvia Divinorum Plant.

Despite the fact that no one has ever been addicted to this Plant – robbed anyone because of it – died of an overdose of it – killed anyone under the influence of it – beat their spouse and children – driven their car off a cliff – jumped out of windows or even painted their face half-blue…….it is now demonized by the mindless parroting media as a deadly addictive menace needing urgent attention.

I saw a TV news reporter interview a so-called Dr. on the topic concerning Ohio’s recent ban of the Plant. The “expert” pointed to YouTube videos of teenagers laughing uncontrollably after using Salvia – and said “Kids are getting HOOKED on this “drug” that has caused several deaths. It causes hallucinations. It promotes inappropriate behavior. Kids are smoking it and displaying inappropriate behavior.”

Yep- inappropriate behavior is a major public menace these days – especially laughing. Hooked on Salvia? What kind of fifth-rate doctor would claim that - when ALL of the current research on Salvia D. indicates it is anti-addictive in itself – and is of possible use in curing other addictions as well?  A TV doctor I guess. Perfect.

And so the various state legislators and law enforcement people all agree that Salvia Divinorum should be made a totally banned & illegal Plant & substance. Mainly – I suspect because they themselves are completely afraid of the concept of drugs, hallucinations – or anything of the type. People who think every drug makes instant gutter-dwelling addicts out of normal people in just one dose. And God knows – hallucinations alone are not real – and the Lord frowns on such activities. He told me so.

Even though I do not advocate the use of Salvia Divinorum in extract form – I don’t think I should deny anyone access to it. I do advocate the use of SD in raw, plain leaf form, eaten (chewed really) or smoked – but only in plain leaf strength. As the Plant caretaker Indians in Mexico learned long ago – the Plant is effective for a wide variety of medicinal uses in addition to its powerful mind-altering capabilities. Migraines, rheumatism, arthritis, digestive problems, specific pains, mental clarity……all have been successfully addressed with low-dose, plain-leaf SD.

As for the mind-altering capabilities – well, SD is a shy spirit in normal raw form. Attaining a fully-immersed, mind-altered state is entirely possible with raw SD – it might just take a whole lot of preparation both mentally & physically, a lot of self introspection as to intent, and the ability to stuff an entire Caesar Salad’s worth of Salvia leaves in your mouth at one time. Oh yeah, you can’t eat them – your stomach acids prevent the active ingredients of the Plant from reaching the bloodstream. You must CHEW the entire bundle of leaves and SWALLOW all the juice generated in the process – as SLOWLY as possible over the period of an HOUR to maximize absorption. And then, if you’ve been a nice person……maybe the Spirit of the Plant will grant you visions.

Then again – if you are a brave soul – and enjoy jumping off of cliffs – into frigid waters – swimming with sharks…….well, maybe the Salvia Extracts of 10 to 20 times regular strength (anything stronger is ridiculous) are your ticket to the Other Side. One big hit of extract should be enough to send any mortal to dimensions not seen with normal eyes. And far beyond that…….a bit too far in my own recollection of a big hit of 20X. I guess that is why most first time Salvia Extract users are One-Time users. The shit will either erase your memory in a big blur – the usual result of a “too-big” extract hit – or throw you into one or maybe dozens of different dimensions that co-exist with our own – I say “different dimensions” as a loose cover-all for all the bizarre visual & mental interpretations that seem to be a constant in all SD extract trips…..that is ….IF you can remember what the hell it was you saw or were thinking while out there in one of the 700 trazillion Salvia Spaces.

But none of it is witchcraft. Far from it.

Here – copied below – is an anonymous post – from some un-named place on the Internet. It is the best and most detailed recollection & analysis of the incredible mind-altering experience Salvia Divinorum delivers that I have ever read. I wish I knew who wrote it – my hat is off to them – because the ideas and concepts articulated are parallel with the SD experience of many I suspect. It is a fascinating read – and again – kudos to the mind & memory behind it. It is often damned hard to bring back memories from Salvia Space. This guy did it Right.

____________________________________________

…. heisted from the Interwebbings…without Permission….

as follows:

This post is long, but I suspect that you will find it worthwhile. It represents a crude summary of my observations of salvia space.

I often have this sense with salvia that I am returning to my natural state, that life was the excursion, not salvia space. Sometimes there are beings all around, and usually they are like regular, every day people, with very particular characters, pronounced ethnicity, and so on.

Often, I see corridors or walls made up of luminous, striped, tube-like things, or flattened tongue-like shapes. And it all flows, like warm taffy, stretching and shifting. And quite often, the walls are lined with depressions, little cubby holes, and inside these are something that gives me the impression of a person, maybe even like an inside-out person.

Sometimes, I find myself pulling back from my normal perspective, as if I am going backwards through a series of membranes, and I find myself “behind” my usual world, so to speak. I have the impression that it is like my body is a house, and I am in the alley. And the perspective I have on the world is contained in this little port in the wall, this little cubby hole, almost like the tunnel in Being John Malkovitch, only much shallower. And as I draw back, I sense all of these other ports, all around me, going on forever.

And when I withdraw from my port, I feel like I lose all interest in the contents of my life, as if that isn’t me, not the real me. Rather, it is as if this personality and body are an avatar through which I inhabit this world, like an MMORPG such as Second Life.

And when I find myself drifting free in this space behind the world, I see all these other ports, with alternate life situations. On a number of occasions, not really willfully, I have drifted into other ports and experienced what it is like to be other people in situations quite different from my own. Not only do I see through their eyes, but I feel their feelings, think their thoughts, as if I am them. What really struck me about this is that in the many cases where the person was culturally different from me, I was acutely aware that their accent wasn’t just in their voice, but also in their thoughts and feelings and perceptual mode. The whole person has a different character, different from me in much the same way that blues is different from reggae.

As I drift about through this corridor, I notice that the feelings of all of these people are emanating out into the space between the walls. And they all seem vaguely aware of me.

Sometimes, other personalities approach me, not like through the ports, but in bodily form, and they seem to try to communicate with me, but often what they are saying doesn’t make sense to me. A few times though, the experience was clear enough that I could ask them a question. Once, I asked this woman who had way too much eye makeup on what this place was and who these people are. She responded with a pained expression, “You don’t remember???!!”

I often get a very strong impression that this is the land of the dead. It seems self-evident to me while I am in that place. I only question it later, when sober and distant from the experience.

One strange thing that I have noticed is that when I have entered these alternate life situations, all of them have been set in the past, never in these times. Often, I find myself in an agricultural setting. One time, I found myself in the body of a somewhat overweight farmer, leaning on his truck on a dirt road next to a farm house. I was looking down at this young girl. She was giggling up at me, and I had the impression that I had just told her a joke. Somehow, I broke free of being locked into his perspective in this scene and I drifted under the truck, even under the dirt, and then over near the headlight on the truck. I was vividly aware of the structure of the grill, and notice that the truck looked very new, but that it was an older style. Later, I searched through pictures of various older trucks and found one that matched the grill that I saw exactly. It was a 1964 Ford F100.

On another occasion, I found myself as something like a ten year old boy in the 1970s, throwing a football with a friend in the backyard on a late autumn day. All the cars on the street were an older style. And I had that 70s hairstyle, the bowl cut, the kind where your bangs are near your eyebrows and the hair is longer in the back. And I had a dark brown insulated vest on. In my real life, I have always hated football. But in this experience, I felt what he felt about football. I loved it. That is very alien to my own life.

I have noticed, reading lots of other trip reports, that finding yourself in an agricultural setting is quite common. Why? Considering that all of these alternate life scenarios that I have experienced were set in the past, maybe agricultural settings are common because a greater portion of the population were farm people as you go back in time, within certain limits of course, with times prior to the agricultural revolution lacking this experience.

Once, I found myself walking a dirt road on the African Savanna, and there were acacia trees in the distance.

Another time, I found myself in the perspective of a young boy at the zoo with his mother. He was holding her hand with one hand and some helium balloons with the other. He was looking up at some huge elephants. I could feel his mixture of terror and awe, and his feeling of clinging to his mother for safety. I could smell cotton candy in the air.

Another time, I found myself in a neighborhood close to a downtown area in some moderately sized city. And I was outside. It was getting near sunset, and my wife was coming home from work, and was carrying several bags of groceries. I was very glad to see her. In my own life, I have never been married. I found the feeling of being married to this woman very convincing, and somewhat unlike how I had previously imagined it would feel.

I have seen something like a mining town in the 1800s as well, and a Mexican man in a sombrero in a heavily vegetated area. I found myself once in the mind of a drunken man in a pool hall. I could fully feel his drunkenness. And when I entered his perspective, everything became very swimmy. I was quite confused, and raised my head (his head), and probably had a strained expression on my face. A woman came over and asked, “are you alright?” The best response I could manage was, “huuhh?” And then I left his head, so to speak, and drifted through a membrane of sorts, and was then seeing his mind represented as one of these heads in a field of heads, very much like the Alex Grey painting for the cover of Tool’s 10,000 Days:

I often get the sense that I am moving through a fourth spatial dimension on salvia, and that this three dimensional space can be seen from some distance away along this fourth dimension, such that it is possible to see all around and even inside things. I can look at it from different angles and see it differently. When I am really close to or even embedded in one of these three-dimensional membranes, the world appears merely three-dimensional.

It is somewhat like this following video clip, where the being is removed from his two-D surface, and can now see everything, including the interior of the other beings like him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUu6zrdlUxI

Notice how if you are embedded in Flatland, you can only see around you in two-dimensions and you can’t see the insides of the other objects in that world. But if you move away from the plane through the third dimension, you get a different perspective and can suddenly see the insides of everyone.

Well, I experience something very much like this on salvia, where I move away from this three-dimensional volume that is my experience of the world. And what I see isn’t so much the physical interior of others, such as their viscera ( thought I think that might be possible, from a certain angle), but rather the inside of their subjective experience, their perspectives.It is as if a person’s interior subjective experience is open, and is fully visible to the inhabitants of this other space. I think of it somewhat like a glove box:

Through the physical world, we can’t access another person’s interior, subjective experience. We can’t enter their perspectives, just as through the box, you can’t enter the other glove. To enter the other glove, you have to pull your hand out and then put it into the other glove from outside the box.

This is also somewhat like an MMORPG. Consider a case where you have two computers running Second Life, and the perspective of one avatar is being rendered on one machine, and a different one on another. Through one computer, through the Second Life “physical world”, you can’t enter the other avatar’s perspective, and through that world, you have no access to this one. But if you realize that you are sitting at a computer and are not the avatar, you can get up and go walk over to the other computer and start controlling another avatar and see things from another perspective.

And I realize that this world isn’t solid and real any more than that a virtual world like the Second Life world isn’t physical. It only exists when it is rendered by a particular client, and is seen from the standpoint of a user through an avatar. The only time any part of it is “real” is when a particular computer is running and is rendering that particular view of that world for a user. And the world appears consistent and real to all observers and multiple observers can see the same things from different perspectives because the contents of the world are correlated through a communication network that connects all of the client machines. If no computer was online at the moment, the world wouldn’t really exist.

I think that what I have seen on salvia agrees with what quantum mechanics seems to suggest, that only what is being observed is actual, and all that is truly objectively real is the code that describes how this world must behave. The wave function is somewhat like the mathematical code in a video game that describes how that virtual world works, and the code has variables. It is open for input. It solves the world for the user’s input. It isn’t completely deterministic, just as quantum physics says about our world. Quantum physics shows a gap in the physical world, some degrees of freedom, a range of possibilities that are not determined, a lack of causal closure. Maybe this allows the input from a conscious being.

What I seem to have learned is that we are normally completely immersed in this virtual space, and life is like an MMORPG, and our bodies are like avatars through which we experience the world. They are not our real selves. And the sense that I get is that we come here and do this purely for the sake of creative play. A life is a creative project that we are peforming, much like a part in a symphony. Once, while on salvia, I thought of it like this body and personality are like a boat that I use to sail on the lake that is this world. I am not the boat. It is merely a vehicle. And when I leave it, I am no more attached to the contents of that life than I am attached to the contents of a Second Life session. It seems like this world is a big collaborative work of art, and the characters we create through all the choices we make, and what we do in the world is our contribution to this particular creation, our voice in it.

So why would taking a drug that disturbs the brain result in seeing all this, assuming that this is actually what is happening, and that the experience isn’t a hallucination? It seems unreasonable that perturbing your brain with a physical chemical would show you something beyond the brain, right?

Let’s consider the MMORPG scenario again. Suppose that our technology has advanced to the point where we have such incredible processing power that we can simulate worlds down to the level of elementary particles, and that the world is indistinguishable from the “real” world. Suppose we create games like The Sims using this technology. If the technology was good enough and the immersion was complete, you might forget that you are playing a game. And full immersion would require amnesia.

And our technology is moving closer and closer to full immersion. What if you were playing such a game and the computer malfunctioned? Or what if the video feed went down, or things started stuttering, or there were errors? Wouldn’t such things break the immersion and thrust you back into the “real” world where you are hooked up to the interface? Wouldn’t it jar you loose? Even today, if you are really involved in a game, it is almost like that is all there is, but if the computer suddenly crashes, you are jarred back to the realization that you are sitting at a computer. Even if there is just some lag, like the computer isn’t performing well, you suddenly become very conscious of the interface.

Or consider that when you are watching a movie at the theater and the projector jams or whatever, the spell is broken, and suddenly you are jarred back into the theater, and realize that it is just a movie and that you are surrounded by other people. When they fix the projector, little by little, you slip back into the story, and are only partially conscious of your true surroundings.

Maybe, certain chemicals cause the brain to malfunction in such a way that the interface fails, and so you are jarred loose and see your “true” surroundings. You realize that you are in something like a VR arcade.You pull out of the apparatus that connects you to your avatar and have a look around, and you REMEMBER, “Oh yeah! I remember! This is where I live outside of ‘life’! This is the world behind the world!”

Maybe?

When I see these people in the walls, these slots or whatever, sometimes the image seems to be convex and sometimes concave. I am not sure exactly what I am seeing there. It is almost like a row of masks. I made a VERY CRUDE digital sketch of how it sometimes appears:

(sketch missing)

However, it seems to look different depending on your position in this 4D space.

But what is still a mystery to me is the fact that these alternate life scenarios are all set in the past. Just maybe, could these actually be like records of lives that have been lived? Could I be exploring something like a life library? Could they be past lives? Am I time travelling? What is going on here? Why no present day scenarios?

It is almost like everyone leaves a track through this mind-time-space with their lives, and once the life is over, it is on exhibit or something, and you can move through that track and play it back, so to speak. I have seen my own life, or what has occurred so far, represented as a long row of moments, stretching back to the left, toward the past. And I could sense my childhood down this corridor, to my left. The feelings were wafting up to me from over there. To the right was the future, and there was nothing there. It was like I had momentarily gotten outside of my timeline, or could see time all laid out, instead of just on moment at a time. My life was like a stack of mind state moments, stretching across a distance, with my birth at one end and the present moment at the other, and nothing beyond. It looks a bit like a tunnel, and when you look to the left through this series, you can see how your experience evolves over time, not just sensations, but even thoughts. The thoughts themselves make spacetime traces, and have a “shape”.

I have not seen this myself, but from some trip reports, something like the Everett Many World’s Interpretation of quantum physics seems apparent, where trippers see other tracks, alternative possibilities for their own lives, and there is some struggle to make sure to return to the “correct” one.

It seems obvious to me when on salvia that this is the space outside of our normal lives, and that we don’t die with our bodies, that we just leave the life, or withdraw from the port, or whatever, and then we go on to something else and have some other experience, maybe in a completely different kind of world.

And that’s all folks…………….- HV

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