Salvia Divinorum Scotland - Experience - Beauty and the Beast

<body stylesrc="../../technical/backgroundforotherauthors.htm" background="../../technical/paperwords.jpg" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" vlink="#000080" alink="#800080"> <p align="center"><font size="5" color="#008000">Salvia Divinorum Scotland ~ Experience ~ Beauty and the Beast</font> <hr> <b> <p><font size="4">n+2<sup>th</sup></font><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> go ~ Separate Entities</font></p> </b> <blockquote> <p><font face="Times New Roman">I've had two more attempted goes. The first was very enjoyable. As before, I stayed in the driving seat throughout, and had a good time. I used 5 leaves, I think 5 leaves is an ideal amount. I want to take stronger doses, but not until I've got some kind of strategy in place to deal with the monsters.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Another time I decided to cut off a bit of stem. There were 3 inches of stem above a top node, and clearly nothing was going to happen above that point, so why not cut it off. The stem was 3/8 inch square, not counting the wings, and I figured that it contained more solid mass than any number of leaves I'd ever taken, so it might be quite a trip. But when I cut it off, I found it was hollow, so it wasn't such a mass after all.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">I tried it on its own, without really expecting anything, just as a learning experience. It was very mild. It was hard to tell whether there was any real effect or just the so-called placebo effect that a mental attempt to tune into Salvia is bound to bring. I think there was a very mild real effect, in which case in future a piece of stem like that can count as one or two leaves towards the total needed for a decent trip. Have you any experience with stems?</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Now lets talk about how to deal with negative experiences. Maybe you can help me.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">All my Salvia trips have the same structure, good or bad. This is how they go. I experience the presence of a group of "people", "entities" or "personalities", who are usually very similar at any given time, though sometimes they form a varied group such as a family or other cohesive team. From one occasion to another they can be absolutely anything. In my first goes they were often Mexicans or Mazatecs, but that doesn't happen these days, they can just be anything at all, and sometimes their personalities are staggeringly complex and "ordinary", just like the real person in the street would be if you could really get to know them. By "ordinary" I mean that they are not like archetypes or stereotypes but have all the complex contingent clutter of the walking wounded who go about the earth.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Now before I go on I must tell you the mindset that I bring to a Salvia trip. I realise this mindset is one among many possible ones, and that it would be beneficial to me to try others, but once you've fallen into this mindset there seems no way out of it. The mindset is that I'm a person who needs "therapy" or "healing" (not primarily physical healing) and that I'm hoping the trip will give it to me.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Because of the books I used to read, and the experiences I've had in dreams and hypnagogic states, and with other psychedelics too if I remember rightly, I've come to regard any entity that you see in an altered state of consciousness as a potential "part of yourself", which, if you play it right, you will get "integrated" with and end up a more whole person as a result.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">This does NOT work with the entities I see on Salvia, and this is where I always get thrown. To treat them as parts of myself is always quickly shown to be as crass a mistake as if I was to go into a cafe in real life and treat all the people there as parts of myself. Whatever these entities are, they are not parts of myself, and I need to find a different approach to them.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">A weaker version of the "parts of myself" theory is that everything I see during a Salvia experience is "exactly what I'm meant to see at that time", i.e. it's a picture designed by some power to show me exactly "where I'm at" or whatever. As a rather mundane example, say I was planning to visit someone tomorrow and I saw in my mind's eye a vision of them on a sunny beach, then I remembered that of course they were away on holiday. Here there's no point in taking the person on the beach as "part of myself", the message involves them being themselves. But still the vision was "precisely what I needed to see at that time". Only normally it will be what I need to see for psychological or spiritual reasons rather than practical ones.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Well, even this weak form of the theory won't stand up on Salvia. Instead, I'm always forced to the conclusion that it's like in real life, when you go into a cafe, the people there aren't placed there by some power that's trying to give you a personal message, they've just arrived there by various contingent reasons of their own which as far as you're concerned are blind chance.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">On the other hand, there's one way in which the Salvia entities are very different from people in a real life cafe. On Salvia you can find yourself becoming one of these entities, experiencing their existence from the inside. Note that this does not prove they were "part of myself" all along. One could have a world in which it was possible to do this with the random people in a cafe. In fact, it leads to further proof that they're not parts of myself. If you manage to merge with a character who's "part of yourself", then this means you have now accepted that aspect of yourself, and you feel integration and recognition. This doesn't happen with the Salvia entities. They're as foreign to me when I'm being them as they are when I'm watching them.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Well, because of all this, and because it's so new to me, I simply don't know how I should relate to them. What is the etiquette of that realm? If they're someone nice, it's not a problem, I just be them and have a good time. But if they're someone nasty, it is a problem.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Under the "therapy" mindset, it is particularly valuable to integrate with a nasty aspect of yourself, because this will be one that was causing you all kinds of trouble so long as you disowned it. So I'm often tempted to put on the nasty virtual selves that I see on Salvia in the hope of some "growth". This is where I go wrong. First off, they are not virtual selves just waiting to be put on like clothes on a rack. It's rather like if you went into a clothes shop and tried to put on a coat that you thought was hanging on a rack, only to find that someone was wearing it!</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">I'm reluctant to chase away the nasty characters because I'm conditioned to think of this as a "cop-out", like you're avoiding facing something. This was the barrier I finally broke through on trip n+1. I just shooed all the nasty ones away and had a party with the nice ones. But in your email you seem to agree that maybe I'm avoiding facing something by doing this.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">I really need a policy settled in advance as to how I'm going to deal with these entities, before I next take a really strong dose.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">What really freaks me is when you allow yourself to be one of the entities and it becomes so real that you think you're entering a world which from now on will take over the status of "real life" for you, and you'll never be able to get back to the real life you used to have. That was what seemed about to happen to me with the dog, which was why I wrote a word in the air so as to make it be a miraculous dog and weaken its credibility as an alternative real world.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Anyway, back to how the entities operate. They sort of crowd round you, and it's like they're a "thought" which you're about to have. If you decide to go on and have that thought, they get nearer and nearer, but if you decide not to have that thought, they draw back, but will soon be replaced by others, because if the mind decides not to have one thought it will soon think of another one it does want to have.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">If you fully decide to have that "thought", you become one of the entities. If you change your mind at the last moment, it may be too late, or at least it may be very unpleasant, - an ugly scramble for safety.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">But if you do go all the way, you are then a person (or dog!) in some scene, often with other people around, or if there aren't any at first there will be before long. Sometimes one of the other people in the scene gets closer and bigger while you get smaller and fainter, and it's like they are a "thought" which if you go ahead and "have" it, then you will now be that person in the scene instead of the one you were before, though it will still be the same scene. If you decide not to have that thought, and draw back, then the person you were recovers strength and the other one goes back to their normal size and distance.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">With my rational mind I'm pretty sure that there's nothing to worry about. I strongly suspect that if I'd gone all the way into being that dog, I'd have woken up out of it back into my normal self before long. But it's very scary at the time. There is the overwhelming conviction that the "real life" you had been living was just some dream and that the experience you're now entering has the real status of "real life" and will take over as your reality for years and years until the you in that life dies.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">You are shown that this could happen - and you don't have a shred of argument to disprove that it could happen - it is plain as anything that it could happen, because the resulting state would be self-consistent and not contradict anything.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">You are also shown that if the powers that be decided that this would happen, you would be putty in their hands, with no hope of bucking their decision.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">So you lie there, aware that this thing could perfectly easily happen, that if it does you have no power to prevent it, and that it seems very much to be happening - well, that's all pretty scary. On the other hand, if I really make the wholehearted decision to risk it next time, then that's what I'll do. It will only take courage, after all.</font></p> <p><font face="Times New Roman">Comments please!</font></p> </blockquote> <p> </p> <hr> <table border="0" width="100%"> <tr> <td width="21%"> <p align="left"><a href="../../experience/index.html"><Back to Experience</a></td> <td width="15%"> <p align="center"><a href="../../home.html">Main Menu</a></td> <td width="15%"> <p align="center"><a href="../../salvia/index.html">Salvia Menu</a></td> <td width="26%"> <p align="center"><a href="../../salvia/effects/index.html">Salvia Effects</a> / <a href="../../salvia/effects/feedback/index.html">Feedback</a></td> <td width="13%"> <p align="center"><a href="../../menu2.html">Menu 2</a></td> <td width="10%"> <p align="right"><a href="../../contact/index.html" title="contact details and links to information on salvia prices and availability">Contact</a></td> </tr> </table> </body>