Disregard Everything I say

The popular and freely available hallucinogen known as Salvia, is in my opinion probably one of the most confusing experiences a human being can possibly go through making it perhaps the most difficult of all substances to explain. This is a substance that feels completely unlike all other psychedelics and is technically classed as an A-typical dissociative by erowid.
The reason it is so unique in terms of effects is due to how it effects the brain, while pretty much all of the classic psychedelics work by simply happening to fit into our serotonin receptors Salvia does not do this and instead targets the brains k-opoid receptors creating for a completely bizarre style of tripping that many people find terrifying. So I will attempt to break down this thing down into it’s base components right here.

Bodyhigh:

The physical sensation of this sort of trip is almost entirely characterized by what I call “Salvia Gravity”. This is present at even mild trips and increases proportionally with dosage until it is all encompassing, beginning with a heavy sensation that pulls and tugs at the body. As this increases it inevitably becomes so powerful that it swiftly lifts the tripper up and out of their body in a direction that simply doesn’t make sense and into a place so different from anything previously experienced that words fail to describe it.

This is sometimes accompanied by the sensation of pins and needles all over a persons skin that for an unlucky few can become very uncomfortable, most people however never experience this feeling at all.

Headspace:

While most drugs usually enhance or heighten certain cognitive functions and simultaneously lower others Salvia does not do anything like this. Instead it literally lowers everything all across the board, it’s this effect that contributes to Salvia being extremely confusing and creates for an experience devoid of introspection for most people as this isn’t a substance that creates profound thoughts, just profound experiences.
The average first time user of Salvia generally experiences a mixture of extreme gigglyness and confusion. Paranoia and panic are also very common for the unprepared and this can be accounted for by the fact that k-opoid antaganists have been shown to cause such feelings in people, you combat this in just the same way that the paranoia induced by weed can be handled. Simply take Salvia in a safe, comfortable environment away from noise and brush off all negative thoughts as irrational paranoia before they can even begin to develop themselves.
This only really happens at mild – moderate dosages, however a breakthrough Salvia trip feels completely different mentally with a huge amount of egoloss but not necessarily egodeath being very common. This is egodeath at 99% and feels as if you are receiving the sensory input of your trip, but not fully conscious enough to think about the implications of it until you come down.
Language use is also extremely affected with many users going as far to report that their thought processes become replaced with a completely garbled and nonsensical alien language. This can be described as pure syntax that is completely devoid of meaning.

Visual effects and Hallucinations:

The visual effects of Salvia have a completely alien and unique style to them not found anywhere else, instead of the typical fast flashes of geometric patterns found during a typical trip these visuals are of a completely different nature.
Salvia’s typical open eye visuals are unimpressive but rather confusing, a sensation of being flattened into one unified surface is common when a persons eyes are kept open and this seems to play heavily on different sections of your vision as the objects in front of your face become devoid of meaning.
Closed eye visuals however are instead most commonly experienced as murky yet defined shapes that are not quite as abstract as your typical closed eye visuals but instead more heavily based on mathematical constructs such as extremely elaborate fractals that come with a sense of physical scale and depth to them. These constructs are often so huge that they expand for hundreds to thousands of miles and do not change by means of quick morphing flashes but instead change by panning, zooming and rotating slowly into view as more and more detail is gradually revealed. A sensation of folding between frames of still constructs and visuals is also quite common and these often behave in a similar fashion to the structures found on dissociatives such as MXE.
The hallucinations at low to high doses, these are very murky to look at but still extremely detailed as most of the details are felt instead of seen. For example you may be hallucinating during a breakthrough trip that there is a crowd standing in front of you and although you can barely make them out using your sight you can sense and feel every last one of them in a level of detail comparable to normal vision.

Although these hallucinations are limitless in their potential and can encompass anything there is interestingly enough one very commonplace scenario found on Salvia which is the sensation of becoming a random inanimate object. This object could be literally anything but the most common seem to be, a conveyor belt, a brick in a wall or a book.  

Leaves vs Extract vs Oral:

There are three different forms of Salvia trips with the leaves providing a much more relaxing trip when smoked that is equally as intense visually and the extract being much more intense when it comes to the body high and the physical sensations of tripping on Salvia. 
Orally active Salvia is taken by creating a tea or chewing on leaves/extract, this results in a trip that lasts upwards of two hours instead of 15 minutes and eases you in and out of trip slowly rather than hitting you like a tonne of bricks before you can even exhale. It’s worth noting that the traditional method of Salvia consumption is orally with the Mazatec shamans claiming that Salvia “does not like to be smoked”.

I personally prefer smoking Salvia leaves as it seems to be a much more pleasant experience and are extremely cheap and available all over the internet.

Some statistics:

A survey performed 6 months ago involving 170 people performed on the r/psychonaut board over at reddit provided this guide with some very useful charts and statistics on the topic of what your average person experiences during a Salvia trip and can be found right here.  

What it’s like:

Ego death is the highest level of psychedelic experience along side Hallucinations and Entity contact and exists in different forms even outside of psychedelics that can be reached through sensory deprivation tanks, meditation or simply being asleep / unconscious as any loss of self can technically be characterized as Ego death but here I am only going to talk about the state of Ego death that can be induced by psychedelics.

A state of psychedelic induced ego death is reached when a tripper has finally taken such a large dosage that their sensory filter is at 0% and is therefore allowing every single tiny bit of brain function and sensory input to reach the conscious faculties regardless of whether or not it is relevant in an extremely visual and felt form. This includes not just the sensation of being able to comprehend the input of every single nerve ending across your entire body all at once but also the sensation of experiencing all concepts, memories, archetypes and information stored within the brain in a single instant giving an extremely profound feeling that you are experiencing the entire universe all at once forcing you to feel completely one with all of existence and this is often interpreted as a perceived loss of boundaries between your body and the rest of the universe. This oneness is so infinitely huge and profound that the people who experience it in a positive and safe setting almost universally report that it feels as if their entire life has been building up to this single moment and that they are finally “getting off the train”.

Unlike the feeling of being able to comprehend all of your sensory input this state of oneness is not 100% constant when reached but is rather something that happens repeatedly over and over again pulling you in and out of the room. Egodeath is triggered by the experience of a concept and the completely all enveloping runaway thought processes that ensue because of them. For example if you were to hear somebody say the word “internet” a runaway thought process would immediately begin as you experience all concepts attached to your idea of “the internet” and all concepts attached to those. This spreads outwards infinitely and quickly encompasses everything in such a powerful and overwhelming way that you’re ego is immediately destroyed due to sensory overload. Once this is over in 3 – 4 seconds however your ego begins to quickly restack and reform itself as you are placed back into the room, this only stays however for a very short time as another trigger is usually experienced instantaneously putting trippers into rapid fire bursts of not having any concept of the real world or anything in it. This experience of the entire universe typically looks and feels like an infinite sea of all enveloping fractals, concepts and non Euclidean geometry.

Learning to function during this state:

Due to the overwhelming nature of this state your typical person’s reaction is to immediately lay down and not even attempt to get back up until it is over as trying to function during this state quickly leaves most people in a permanent state of confusion and thought loops as they try to grasp what is happening to them but just as a baby learns to walk and talk so can we learn to function while being completely one with the entire universe. 

Although this sensory overload completely envelops your ego and short term memory leaving trippers permanently stuck in the present and unable to remember anything from more than 1 or 2 seconds ago a persons long term memory is left completely intact allowing you to retain basic knowledge such as who you are and where you are but not anything beyond the most basic of conversation skills as new information becomes near impossible to store. Our long term memory being left intact during Ego death allows us to avoid a state of permanent confusion with some practice providing the person has already stored the concept of ego death and all that it entails into their long term memory before they begin to trip giving them the sensation that they know and have a basic understanding of what is happening to them but do not remember any of the unimportant specific details. This is enough to help avoid the commonly felt state of permanent confusion and from here you can begin to learn to walk and perform tasks in a mental state with capabilities somewhat similar to that of a very young child or an animal meaning only the most basic of knowledge is felt and understood during this state.

Despite the fact that your short term memory has almost completely disappeared however your memory of the recent past can be extended from the typical zero seconds into the past to 4 – 10 seconds into the past which is the length of a sober persons short term memory but only if extra sensory input is constantly experienced. For example if you keep moving around you find that egodeath only occurs once you stop and focus on a concept for even a split second and through this technique a constant source of sensory input can keep you in the room allowing you to walk, function and to eventually with practice: maintain a coherent conversation for more than 3 seconds.

The easiest way to do this is to constantly keep moving around with a spring in your step but it’s worth noting that the constant background stimulus of a strobe light such as the one found on this webpage here allows you to maintain a constant connection to the room and extends your memory field considerably. 

Learning to function like this opens you up to all sorts of experiences based on sensations such as walking around and living in a state based purely on animal like reflexes and an infinite sense of oneness that seems to come so naturally to the human brain. The subconscious has no problem whatsoever with creating sensations that the universe is one ongoing intertwined process that we are not in anyway separate from and this is often felt as a permanent but subtle change in perspective that lasts a very long time even after the tripper has come down from the experience.

If you want to experience Ego death your best bet is to combine a strong dose of LSD and some good weed but Ego death can also be achieved through Mushrooms and other psychedelics in very large doses. Keep taking increasingly high doses and you will eventually get there.

I’ve already spoken about testing the existence of DMT/ Ayahuasca and Mushroom entities through simple questioning right here but I think that using mathematics to do this could be a much more interesting way to go even if the existence of such things are immediately shown to be a complete fabrication. Which to be honest, is probably the most likely outcome.

As a person who is completely useless at maths it would be very interesting to ask autonomous entities (particularly entities who appear to be all knowing) simple mathematical questions that are beyond my immediate comprehension such as “64 x 112” and to then time how long it takes for a response. Assuming they can answer at all I could then across multiple trips ask entities questions of increasing complexity to find the upper limit of their abilities and see just how far I could push it as doing this could teach us multiple awesome things about the nature of psychedelics and the human brain.
This will obviously have to be done with a polite attitude because entities do have the power to crush you.

There are 3 possible outcomes to performing this experiment, which are: 

The Entities fail to answer the questions.

If the entities outright fail, refuse to answer or show mathematical skills no better than that of the tripper then this is yet another line of evidence suggesting that they simply do not exist or are at least not nearly as all knowing as some of them seem to be. This combined with the results of my further questioning that I suggested in the previous article on this topic would be the final nail in the coffin in my opinion and would finally provide us with an answer.

The Entities succeed in answering the questions, but there is an upper limit.

If the entities are capable of solving with greater ability than the conscious skills of the tripper then things are really starting to get interesting, this doesn’t necessarily prove their existence (although it certainly helps) but it does let us find out a few things about the human brain as finding the upper limit of their ability to answer basic multiplication questions would essentially show us what the exact processing limitations of the subconscious mind are and just how far it is ahead of our conscious processing power and personal experience leads me to suspect that it is might be leaps and bounds ahead of what is consciously available to us.

The Entities succeed but there is no upper limit.

If everything goes perfectly and the entities pass all questioning beyond what could reasonably be considered the physical limitations of a human brain then goddamn. This would be proof that this experience isn’t just a hallucination that acts like it is in possession of a huge wealth of knowledge inaccessible to me but that it really is exactly what it claims to be. OH MAN 

Each of these outcomes would be a fascinating discovery so although it’s probably going to be the first option this is still definitely worth a try and nobody else is working on it so it’s a chance to break some brand new ground and do front line research. I’m finally ready to get working on this very shortly through a series of high dose Ayahuasca trips and you’re welcome to help out and report back if you want to but I do understand that most people are far too lazy for this sort of shit so I shall push on regardless.

Ayahusca is by far my favourite psychedelic, it is extremely easy to make and offers a completely different but amazing style of trip that needs to be taken much more seriously. Here I will describe in detail each component to give new users a rough idea of what to expect before taking such a drug.

Body high/ Purge:
Depending on how traditional the method of preparation for a users dose of Ayahuasca has been kept the first physical sensation that is usually noticed is an intense nausea that gradually builds up until the user purges and vomits. This vomiting doesn’t feel particularly violent and is over with very quickly but the nausea before it can be horrible and generally makes it difficult to move without feeling like you are going to throw up for the first 45 minutes of the trip.

I’ve been thinking about the purge a fair bit recently as despite the entire internet telling me that it is a necessary and important part of the trip I have yet to see anybody experience a purge without causing an immediate and sudden end to their trip. It does feel surprisingly pleasurable if you let it happen and I know quite a few people are going to disagree with me on this but it really does seem like the purge is an unnecessary bullshit cultural construct that does not actually benefit the trip in anyway and is very easy to eradicate by means such as a few simple recipe changes (the egg whites trick), a little practice and some good weed. If it really was truly necessary to purge before a successful trip Pharmahuasca users would also experience such a thing but they do not.

The physical sensation of the real bodyhigh is a very difficult to place but genuine feeling of euphoria and a sense of being completely in touch with the animal body. At higher doses this sensation becomes spontaneous rushes of intense pleasure that envelops every single nerve ending on your body. This is intense but does not overwhelm and you even have a large amount of control in inducing these rushes if you constantly communicate, encourage and cheer the Ayahuasca on to produce a bodyhigh inside your head. All of this allows you to be fully mobile and to explore anything that you could explore sober providing that you are aware of your limits.

Headspace:

The headspace of Ayahuasca is probably my favourite of all the traditional shamanic psychedelics and seems to put you a very profound state of a completely rational objectiveness that seems intertwined with a wide array of very intense feelings and emotions. This feels as if your cultural filter has been instantly removed and gives you the power to look at any topic without any irrational biases, giving you an intense appreciation for life and everything within in it with a huge thirst for knowledge and thought patterns that generally steer towards thoughts of being human, introspection, the passing of generations, tribal thinking and increased mystical thoughts.

Ayahuasca has incredibly sharp rapid fire thoughts that feel as if a quick paced intelligent conversation with yourself is constantly happening inside of your mind. Language capacity and creativity are greatly increased just as with all psychedelics but as certain brain functions seem to go up others temporarily go down to compensate. It can be very difficult for most people to perform certain complex tasks as motor control and short term memory are usually mildly affected as well an increased sense of distractibility that is found on most hallucinogens. This is hardly a problem however unless you are planning to write a letter or file your taxes during your trip but it’s worth noting that even after a mild Ayahuasca trip you do not feel mentally withdrawn or exhausted but completely straightened out as if each and every one of your thoughts has been reordered and reorganized. This leaves you with a personality that feels altered and humbled for the better after every successful trip.

A Sensed Presence of the “Other”:

During an Ayahuasca trip it is almost universally reported that it genuinely feels as if there is an authoritative presence or intelligence that is completely guiding or directing the trip with a sometimes twisted sense of humour. It really does feel as if the Other is sitting behind the scenes pushing all the right buttons and completely directing your trip from a position that is not always on your side. This Other has a habit of punishing the irrational, the arrogant and just about anybody who goes into this with the wrong attitude and it’s this habit that in my opinion makes Ayahuasca a drug that should be seriously researched before trying.

This feeling of the “Other” as if it is controls the intensity of the trip sporadically creating a trip that flows completely differently to other substances which offer a constant stream of visuals instead of a trip that can be so fussy sometimes it simply wont happen if the Ayahuasca isn’t feeling it. This sensed presence of the “other” is the lowest form of entity contact found on psychedelic drugs and is unsurprisingly also very common on low dose DMT trips.

Visual Behaviour:

It was the behaviour of the closed and open eye visuals that really took me by surprise the first time I took Ayahuasca. At first I was expecting a merely alternatively stylized version of the visuals experienced on mushrooms and LSD which are generally described as an incredibly fast moving and constant stream of geometric patterns, fractals and imagery but instead I found a set of incredibly rich and detailed patterns that behave in a bizarrely unique way.
Apart from your typical melting, breathing, tracers, etc the open eye visuals even at lower levels look just like real physical floating patterns that stand still and slowly grow out of the air in a very organic fashion. If allowed these visuals steadily grow, build up, come together and form networks all around you that become increasingly intense as you watch them but die down greatly if they are disturbed. Visuals can be disturbed by many things but sudden changes in the environment such as suddenly having to perform a task, a light being switched on, a sudden change in music or any unexpected changes to the vibes of the room will generally reset them. But despite having been reset the visuals do not take long to grow back and can quickly take over as you immediately begin to lose yourself in them.

These visuals are also very sensitive to light and It’s this aspect that many people confuse as an incompatibility between Ayahuasca and technology as the erratic nature of technology is generally very efficient at causing the visuals to die down a fair bit. This however is definitely not a universal truth and depends entirely on the technology, a first person shooter will probably not cause you to trip very hard but a copy of Planet Earth and some appropriate music will do just the opposite.

The closed eye visuals of an average Ayahuasca trip are not simple flat veils of complex geometry but generally rotating 3D structures of limitless style and possibilities that are comprised of a closed eye visual based material. These structures show huge amounts of imagery and get increasingly drawn out and elaborate depending on the dosage, eventually becoming fully fledged hallucinations, entity contact, imagined landscapes and impossible scenarios.

Hallucinations, Transformations and Distortions:

The open eye hallucinations experienced on Ayahuasca are a common occurrence and happen even at lower doses or when you seem to have completely come down off of your trip. These low level hallucinations are actually a form of photo realistic transformations and distortions and are never created from complete scratch but are instead always based on something such as a pre-existing physical object and often present themselves when you lose focus and stare at literally anything. This losing focus and zoning in on something as it elaborately transforms into an incomprehensible anything comes completely naturally during an Ayahuasca trip and unlike the cartoony and silly distortions found on LSD do not disappear once you realize they are there. These hallucinations only collapse in on themselves once you double take but are still insanely persistent compared to other psychedelics as an ability to remain completely and constantly lost in the distortion seems to be present.

Low level distortions come in the form of the tunnelling and sectioning of objects in your peripheral vision. This is experienced as objects in the corner your eye appearing to pushed back into themselves in a way that forms a deep tunnel of identical shape. These are not very well defined despite being obviously there and always immediately disappear if you try to directly look at them.

Dreams:

Many many misinformed people on the internet believe that DMT is released from the pineal gland during dreaming and death. Although this has been shown to be completely untrue from personal experience there does seem to be at least some sort of underlying tenuous connection between the DMT molecule and dreaming as although it is generally noted by most Psychonauts that the act of tripping increases the intensity of your dreams during sober living me and others have never experienced such a sudden jump in the intensity and realism of our dreams since we started taking Ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca completely changes the style of your dreams, causing them to become elaborate and incredibly psychedelic in a far more profound way than any of its close relatives.

Ok this isn’t exactly a full article but it does need to be out there. For some reason there is something about strobe lights and tripping; if you look into a strobe light during a psychedelic trip it immediately begins to induce the most bizarrely intense visuals as you receive one mindgasm after the other just looking at the thing.
You don’t necessarily need a working strobe light to do this either as websites offer simple online strobe lights that work pretty well depending on the capabilities of your screen, If you close your eyes and put your face right up to the screen under the influence of even a mild trip it’ll drive you insane as the visuals just continue to build up and up. I have no idea why this works but I guess it must be some sort of reaction to the constant rapidfire dilation and constriction of the pupils that does this so if you’re currently tripping or planning on tripping around a computer soon please try and remember to check this out and report back.

This also works on dissociatives such as MXE and DXM and can even spontaneously induce full on hallucinatory scenarios when you were only previously feeling a little dissociated. 

It generally works to an extent even a long time after the comedown, hell it does it for me when simply high but I’m pretty sure that one is probably just me.

» http://www.netliberty.net/dreamachine-view.html «

I’m pretty sure 99% of you will already agree with me on this one but judging by some of the messages I receive and the heated trollfests that I see quite often within my favourite online psychedelic communities there are an insistent group of people that like to push the idea of there being a “wrong” and a “right” way to trip and that it’s even possible to disrespect the trip through certain ways such as using psychedelics for purely recreational activities instead of deep spiritual journeys into the mind.

Now I understand that traditional shamanic psychedelics such as Ayahusca and Mushrooms are powerful ancient healers and should be treated with respect but if I want to watch Adventure Time and play videogames on a mind blowing dose of either then I will do just that, some people may prefer to be doing something else with their trips but to then assert that their completely subjective experience is somehow more valuable than somebody else’s completely subjective experiences is just plain retarded. Just because I am enjoying myself does not mean I am showing a lack of respect for anything.

Another way in which I have supposedly been violating the sacred rules of internet technoshamanism has been on this very tumblr as a result of the posting of simple and easy to follow extraction methods because apparently we should all know that these substances are a “calling” and if people truly want them they will seek them themselves and therefore to make it easy for people is to somehow disrespect the psychedelic experience. I honestly don’t see the point of messages like this as they seem a little silly. It’s not as if you were just sitting there and DMT called out to you from beyond the stars, no you heard about it through a friend or read about it somewhere just like everybody else. Making the extraction process easier so that people do not have to make sense of and browse multiple old forum posts that all contradict each other is not a terrible thing. In fact you could argue that since there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with modern culture and the only thing currently capable of fixing this problem on an individual level over a quick enough time scale to prevent us from collectively fucking everything up seems to be these very compounds it would have been rude not to post them. 

These rules apply to all psychedelics but none more so than Ayahuasca which has many restrictions and practises attributed to it that aren’t really based on anything at all, these include but are not limited to:

• You should never try Ayahuasca without the guidance of an experienced shaman.
• You should never use Ayahuasca recreationally in any capacity. Ever.
• You should never take preventative measures to remove the purge from the trip.

None of these are true. Although great care and caution should be shown until a user is completely comfortable with the powerful trip Ayahuasca has to offer a common sense approach and a sitter that knows what they are doing will make for just as safe a trip as any shaman from the rainforest. 

It is entirely up to the individual and the knowledge of their own limits when deciding what they want to do with their trips. How some people manage to place completely arbitrary cultural constructs onto a group of substances that’s main effect is the removal of such things I do not know.

The last restriction that is placed on Ayahuasca is the stigma of removing the purge as many people feel that it is an intrinsic part of the trip but I do still feel that it is obviously not an intrinsic part of the trip. It is an intrinsic part of ingesting pulverised rootbark that has been simmered down into a foul sludge and nothing more. If this were anything but the case you would not be able to remove it with an extremely simple recipe change (adding eggwhites hurr) and Pharmahuasca users who take 100% pure dmt instead of drinking it in liquid form would also experience such intense nausea. I do not want to ingest wood I just want to ingest the DMT.

I am with these people to an extent and completely agree that these moments of recreational use are not exactly deep spiritual work or how I should spend every moment of my trips but as somebody who has benefited enormously from tripping on a very regular basis I sometimes genuinely run out of introspection and personal problems to solve and just want to have fun, this is nothing but a good thing and although quite difficult, interacting with a breakthrough partial egodeath trip by attempting to play videogames, going shopping or whatever the hell you feel like doing can be a pretty hilarious experience if you know your limits.