Experiences - a 'presence' when smoking salvia?

[shogun875]

SWIM has tried salvia a couple of times, and the twice when he got the effect out of it he had an interesting experience.

The first time SWIM tried salvia he was quite stupid and did in while quite drunk, and after 2-3 hits of 20x he blacked out, but before he did he recalls feeling a presence out of sight to the right of him. SWIM doesnt remember to well but supposed the presence spoke to him but doesnt remember what it said. SWIM does recall it being female, and remembers associating it with an 'ice queen,' but SWIM was smoking in an igloo so thats probably why. When coming down SWIM had a literal 'light at the end of the tunnel' vision coming back to his body, and again a presence to his right, but it didnt speak.

SWIM forgot about most of the experience, (and basically everything else from the night, as i said he was quite drunk) retaining only a "wow I need to do that when im sober" feeling until the next time he had a substantial amount of salvia.

This time SWIM was sober and back in the igloo. SWIM started with 3 hits of 20x, and after a minute became impatient and had another 2 hits (mistake). The bottom dropped out from under SWIM. SWIM felt like he was caught in a plane of glass and was being turned down to the left then sucked into a different world. as he entered he felt the presence again (forgotten about until then) and distinctly remembers hearing in his head "Ahhh... he's (you're?) back...." SWIM then felt like he was trying to be pushed, or forced to, or that he should climb through a window, but quckly became freaked out and thought he would never make it back, and being in a small confined space (igloo) he then became extremely claustriphobic. SWIM's sitter tried to calm him down and kept him from basically tearing apart the igloo (a good example of why SWIY should have a sitter) and SWIM came down soon enough and relaxed.

With all the commotion the claustraphobia caused SWIM forgot about the presence and the window again until a friend of his described their expereince with salvia as trying to climb though a window in almost the exact same words SWIM had thought of it in.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar? SWIM has experimented with DMT as well as salvia but this was different, there was no specific entitiys or beings SWIM came in contact with, but rather only a remote presence. Also unlike DMT SWIM was not transported into another world completly, but into variations of our own. SWIM's sitter when she tried it had a similar experience in this manner, describing worry as she was coming down that she would not make it back to the right version of our world. SWIM has tried salvia a couple more times but never had enough to get back to a similar state, but if/when he does SWIM will share.

So any thoughts/similar experiences? Sorry for being a bit long-winded but I thought it was interesting enough to share as encountering beings is common with DMT, but SWIM had not heard anything really like this with salvia before.

[jdarthur]

There are books (which shall remain nameless) available through a major online bookseller, that describe many similar experiences.
Good luck.

[readeadamie]

SWIM doesn't smoke Salvia anymore. Almost everytime SWIM did I encountered crocodile people. They lived in an Aztec style village. SWIM smokes Salvia. The previous statement is not self-incriminating as Salvia is not a criminalized plant, it is nonetheless false.

[Benga]

the legal status of salvia, or other plants or products where swiyou may be does not come into play.
please read the rules
and do not self incriminate.

[morican69]

Jesus has only done it once before but he did feel a presence and heard a female voice, behind me on his right. He also felt fear of not being able to come back to his own reality even though he could remember that it wasn't going to last long and trying to tell himself this, he still freaked out a little.

After he felt at peace for a few days after, nothing could bother Swim and swim is usually easily irritated by stupid people he encounters throughout his day, but salvia seemed to give his a strange peace and different understanding/relationship with things around him, hard to explain.
Almost a spiritual awakening for lack of a better explanation.

He will do it again, hopefully someday he can enter and enjoy the experience without fear and hopefully see and or hear more stuff.

[OsCarwild]

look through erowid.org's salvia experience vaults. that should give SWIY what they are looking for

[morican69]

Thank you, Swim has used erowid as an informational resource in the past and did read up on Salvia on there before trying it, but he has not read testimonials, he will now, thanks again.

[TMcK]

SWIM encountered a presence from jump street.

SWIM remembers a voice, old as the hills, echoing through his head, saying something to the effect of, “You thought you were ready to see the universe, little man?” This was followed by laughter of a sort, although none of this was precisely heard so much as sensed on some other level. SWIM has encountered an entity or entities on many occasions since, and has gained a great deal of insight into what he is encountering, but the very first time, SWIM was struck with the notion that this being was an ancient American Indian, thousands of years old – perhaps even the morphogenetic template for an entire tribe. Whatever it was, SWIM felt that I was directly connected to the earth and the stars in some way that made it both infinitely wise, and infinitely distant to him – although not without compassion.

More recently, SWIM has encountered a multitude of entities without bodies (at least in the classic sense) which bloomed like biomechanical machine flowers/vines around his soul, laughing and dancing in an alarming way. “You’re cartoons!” SWIM exclaimed, understanding that these things weren’t THE entities anymore than his own body was him, but rather some sort of three-dimensional model of him existing in this plane. As if to verify this, these singing, dancing mech-flowers sang out, “Everything you know is a cartoon!” As is typical in his Salvia experiences, SWIM was aware of meaning which was not necessarily stated aloud, but which was nevertheless part of the message. If it had been parsed into English, it might have said, “All things in the bardo of matter and light are cartoon representations of language – not language in terms of written or spoken words, for those are merely symbols, but the impulse behind those symbols. All nature is communicating with you, you have simply forgotten how to see/hear/sense it.”

What is very interesting to SWIM is that while every time the trip is different, it is always thematically similar, although how this is so, he is not entirely sure how to articulate. I have read that this sort of thing is widely reported among users of various psychedelics: that each has its own unique personality, its own set of themes, which seem to be across the board, regardless of the users background, belief system, or even knowledge of aforementioned phenomena. The following is a piece of audio I transcribed from the 1993 Terence McKenna lecture, “History Ends in Green: Gaia, Psychedelics and the Archaic Revival”:

“It’s an interesting question; why do drugs have identities like this, and do they have them? And the answer is, ‘Yes, they certainly do!’ It’s one of the puzzling pieces of information I try to keep in front of me when trying to understand these things. It’s irrational that, for instance, no matter who you are – Viennese Jew, Icelandic ski instructor, or Irish pub owner – if you take ayahuasca, you will see large snakes, large cats and dancing black people; in this order of statistical frequency: black people being not as common as cats and snakes, cat being not as common as snakes, snakes being the most common.

“What’s going on, here? How can it be that a chemical compound that can be defined down to the quantum mechanical positions of the atoms nevertheless seems to carry informational content of some sort? Well, I don’t know, but here is one possibility, and perhaps there are others: maybe this is support for Sheldrake’s[1] hypothesis of formative causation; that actually, around the drug a complex of ideas has secreted itself in some kind of psychological hyperspace; a pattern has been worn in hyperspace which is the pattern of how this drug works. And it’s really in some sense a composite of all the trips, of all the people who ever took it. Well, since for the first twenty thousand years, all the people who ever took ayahuasca had snake and jaguar fear as a major source of anxiety… we discover that up front. But, of course, why the dancing black people? This becomes less easy to understand.

“(The other possibility is that) the reason these things are so message-specific is that this is the plant; this is its presentation. With ayahuasca, particularly, its language is visual. I mean, after a strong ayahuasca session, your eyes are bugging out of your head. It’s like a visit to Madison Avenue to buy prints; I mean, you’ve just looked at so many prints, and looked and looked, and compared the Bruegel[2] to the Bosch[3] and the Bosch to Boufoi[4], and all this stuff – you know, look, look, look. And then, for instance, with mushrooms it’s actually verbal. It speaks; it tells you things in plain English, in a conversational mode. I don’t understand – the more I live, the more I see of all this stuff, the less I understand of what is going on.

“Well, I guess this is what we’re left with – that these are the masks by which we understand these things. What happens with the mushroom is, it always has a presentational personality. But when you inquire, you discover that this presentational personality is created for your convenience, and that behind it lurks God knows what. And then when you begin to talk to it about that, that’s when the trip turns off to the left, and begins to get peculiar, because you’re inquiring into its inner nature. With the mushroom, you can actually say, ‘Show me more of what you really are.’ And immediately, the trip will take a turn away from the dancing mice, and all the cheerful hypnogogic riff-raff, towards something… you know, ‘Whooo! Okay, that’s enough of who you really are; reassure me now!’

“So yeah, these things are like personalities, minds. But the question for me is, it’s such a strange way to communicate, that here is a life form that can’t communicate unless you eat it; unless it’s inside you. And then somehow, the moray of its being and your being mesh together, and then these images spring into being. But it is in the very act of passing away, being consumed in your metabolism – it’s like some kind of act of love, or something.

“I asked it once what it wanted to be called, and it said, ‘Call me Dorothy.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ and it said, ‘Because this seems like Oz to me.’ I just report these things, I don’t know why it wanted to be called Dorothy. It’s a very complex feeling, when you deal with the Other. It’s your friend – sort of – and it’s predictable – sort of – but everything has this vibe about it where you don’t want to push too much. I’ve given a lot of thought to trying to think about where I’ve had this feeling that I have when I meet the DMT Elves - and it’s a feeling of exhilaration, but caution, accomplishment, but doubt – and I decided that where I knew this feeling from was years ago in my dissolute youth as a visitor in the back streets of Bombay; into these labyrinths where these guys with shining eyes deformed limbs would take us back into these warrens of streets. And they would know we had enough money on our body to ransom them all for five years income, and we would know that they knew, and yet we would be there to conclude a business deal over a psychedelic substance. And this feeling of meeting the ‘mean traders’… and they had this line calculated to put you completely at your ease, they would say, ‘I am your friend! I am not like all the others.’”

(Laughter)

“Oh great! Wonderful! I feel so much better now! And that’s what these Elves are saying, they’re saying, ‘Don’t listen to him or her, I’m your friend; I’m not like all the others.’ And, you know, you’re clearly the new kid in town, you can barely sit up, and they’re able to pick your pocket from ten dimensions you don’t even know exist!”

[1] Rupert Sheldrake is a fairly controversial biochemist, plant physiologist and parapsychological researcher. He is responsible for morphic resonance theory, a theory which suggests that there is a pattern or cause which governs the development of biological structures; this theory has been met with an almost hostile level of disagreement among the scientific community, largely due to modern science's rather inflexible stance that events occur completely at random, and that the idea of underlying causal attractors or controllers are a by-product of bad thinking.

[2] Presumably the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

[3] Hieronymus Bosch, a 12th-13th century Netherlandish painter most well-known for his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.

[4] No idea. Best guess on the spelling, here.

Reputation Comments on this post:

well-written, thought out description of important experiences; great quote

[Alexander_Praves]

SWIM can relate. A few days ago he tried Salvia alone for the first time, using a homemade bong. Usually, when taking any type of drug, he will put on music, but neglected to do so in this instance. During the trip he heard voices.

They didn't sound like the ones you would hear when involved in conversation with actual people. These utterances seemed like careful whisperings that drifted into his room via the open window, appearing to SWIM as an inherent part of the surroundings, being entities themselves rather than created by any sort of organism.

SWIM remembers hearing something along the lines of: 'He is coming. Is he coming? Why isn't he coming? Are you coming?' SWIM's positive more was said, but almost immediately after returning to his own universe the memory of it started to fade. So it goes. SWIM also recollects uttering (or at least making attempts to) short responses in the vein of, 'Yes, yes, in a minute.' and 'I'm trying.'

SWIM felt somewhat uncomfortable during the whole experience. The feeling would best be compared to the one you get when first meeting your girlfriend's parents. Obligatory politeness all around, but both parties know, at the end of the day, you're requesting to be welcomed in the family on the sole basis of you regularly shagging the little lady of the house. Not quite an intruder, but certainly a guest that is under great scrutiny.

[helikophis]

TMcK, I absolutely love that quote! It's one of those things that I read and say, "yeah, right sure, that's exactly how it is!" Not sure I can add anything to that except "amen." That man sure was something special. Great ways of thinking about the weirdness of psychedelics (or the weirdness of life, however you prefer)!

Also thanks for sharing you own experience, it was also great!

[TMcK]

Originally Posted by helikophis

TMcK, I absolutely love that quote! It's one of those things that I read and say, "yeah, right sure, that's exactly how it is!" Not sure I can add anything to that except "amen." That man sure was something special. Great ways of thinking about the weirdness of psychedelics (or the weirdness of life, however you prefer)!

Also thanks for sharing you own experience, it was also great!

*ahem* You mean "SWIY's experience", of course.

And I am tempted to say that psychedelics are closer to real life than the culture as it currently exists. True, that psychedelics put one in touch with the truly, sometimes appallingly, weird, but never have I been given the impression that this stuff was manufactured inside the animal body/brain, nor is it a product of imagination in the strictest sense. It seems to me to be a different slice of reality from the one in which we spend most of our time; I feel similarly about dreaming, actually. Indeed, our own reality as we know is exceptionally weird, full of idiosyncratic moments, syncronicities, so-called paranormal phenomena, and experiences that could only be described as telepathic or empathic on a level that transcends the classical model of the five senses.

SWIM's own psychedelic journeying has taught him that there seem to be a multitude of what he calls 'subtle senses', not to mention a whole range of synesthesia-related changes in the modality of the classic five. In fact, SWIM has come to the opinion that what Salvia really seems to do is not so much hieghten these subtle senses as to turn the dial waaaay down on the five obvious ones, allowing the observer to become minutely aware of these more subtle forms of input that are normally drowned out.

[shogun875]

Thanks for the replys SWIMMers, has given SWIM some interesting things to think about...

Originally Posted by TMcK

*ahem* You mean "SWIY's experience", of course.

And I am tempted to say that psychedelics are closer to real life than the culture as it currently exists. True, that psychedelics put one in touch with the truly, sometimes appallingly, weird, but never have I been given the impression that this stuff was manufactured inside the animal body/brain, nor is it a product of imagination in the strictest sense. It seems to me to be a different slice of reality from the one in which we spend most of our time; I feel similarly about dreaming, actually. Indeed, our own reality as we know is exceptionally weird, full of idiosyncratic moments, syncronicities, so-called paranormal phenomena, and experiences that could only be described as telepathic or empathic on a level that transcends the classical model of the five senses.

I definitely agree with this, SWIM has never felt he was experiencing something that was not 'real' in some sense. 'a different slice' seems a good way to put it, especially for SWIM's experiences with saliva as SWIM always feels he gets caught in a plane of reality slightly removed from our own, but can see different 'slices' in front of him.

Indeed there is much more to our reality (whether just our own slice we normally live in or including others) that our culture does not account for, and I think psychedelics can help show people that. I hate when people ask me if i believe in the 'super-natural,' because i think there are many things out there that we as a society do not believe in but are in fact part of nature. I did my senior project in high school on taking the nature of the universe that quantum mechanics and relativity teaches us and applying it to our perception of reality and I have to think Schrodinger may have missed something in his equations for the limiting of quantum effects, or perhaps our brains can be influenced on the sub-atomic level.

Originally Posted by TMcK

SWIM's own psychedelic journeying has taught him that there seem to be a multitude of what he calls 'subtle senses', not to mention a whole range of synesthesia-related changes in the modality of the classic five. In fact, SWIM has come to the opinion that what Salvia really seems to do is not so much hieghten these subtle senses as to turn the dial waaaay down on the five obvious ones, allowing the observer to become minutely aware of these more subtle forms of input that are normally drowned out.

This raises the possibility of what you are talking about here, with SWIY's 'subtle senses'. I am not sure how salvia exactly comes into play here. With SWIM's own experiences he gets stuck in a seemingly different plane of reality (and sees more), rather than only percieving the one he is normally in differently, but these could in fact be the same thing, I will continue to think about it. Other psychadelics, such as DMT put you into a complelty different reality, and I am not quite sure how that plays into either, other than it possibly being a far-removed slice/plane of reality....

[TMcK]

Originally Posted by shogun875

I hate when people ask me if i believe in the 'super-natural,' because i think there are many things out there that we as a society do not believe in but are in fact part of nature.

I personally prefer the term supernormal, since it implies that something is occurring outside of the realm of ordinary experience or perception, rather than outside of nature.

[buzzman]

SWIM has tripped many times on Salvia, and from this post have realised... he always sees the same woman in his trips, one he has never met before. She wears a black caped cloak, hood sometimes up. SWIM cant tell you her facial feature because he never really gets a glimpse, but SWIM believe's she has dark blonde mabye brown hair.

She is sometimes the main part of the trip, sometimes just in the background watching SWIM, sometimes it takes SWIM a few days to realise she was even in the trip.

[mr.mackey]

SWIM has had a very similar experience with the female "presence" that swiy described, for swim, it is actually quite comforting and mother like, swim interpreted it to be "mother earth" or something along those lines. Swim has had entity contacts on other substances like DMT and ayahuasca, but salvia has, without fail, produced distinctly female and comforting entities which is striking because the salvia experience as a whole, is terrifying for swim.

[nutta]

swim has done salvia twice and both times has met the "salvia people". it seems to be something everybody experiences.
the first time swim felt a few of them over to his left just out of view (they always seem to be just out of view too). they did not like swim very much and he felt intimidated by them, but knew they couldnt hurt him so wasnt too bothered. but swim was stuck in this thing that was happening in the room and there was 2 ways out. he chose the direction away from the salvia people. according to swims sitter swim was hiding behind him.
the second time the same "salvia people" were there but didnt bother swim. but there was also another female "salvia person" to swims right which he interacted with. swim couldnt actually see her but knew she was there and had a conversation with her. i cant remember if she was telling swim to pass the pipe to his sitter because it was his turn, and swim was saying it was still his turn. or if swim was saying he had to pass it to his sitter, and she was saying to smoke more.
after all that swims sitter helped him smoke more while he was barely coming out of his trip and he went back into the same trip.
according to swims sitter, he looked over to his left (at the other "salvia people") and said he had a point to prove.
swim still doesnt know what he had to prove but he feels like he had to prove to the salvia people that he wasnt intimidated by them.
i believe the "salvia people" are beings that are beyond us. maybe spirits or something along those lines. but then who am i to say things like that. they could be just part of the trip.
altho, all trips swim has tried give the user a different trip each time, and each person has their own experience. it cannot be coincidence that every person who does salvia experiences these "people" and every time.
make your own evaluation of what they are but please tell me your opinion. im fascinated to hear.

[nutta]

swim has had a couple of experiences with salvia. swim and everybody else seems to experience the presence of other "people" during the trip. i will not go into detail about swims trips because i will be typing for hours, but the obviuos presence of other "people" has made swim very fascinated about the spiritual side of salvia.
i would like to hear all your stories about "salvia people". you do not have to go into detail about the trip but i would like to hear it all if you have the patience to try to describe it.

thanx people, cant wait to hear.

nutta

[Benga]

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