Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Cough Interrupted
I haven't written in a while, mostly because there was nothing really new to report. I still consistently get multiverse visions in which I exist as a "cloud of me's" all in one location, with many pairs of eyes, many bodies, many minds, but with a core personality if you will, one central part of my mind that is in common perhaps, with all of my minds. My vision skips around between the many versions of myself, between my many pairs of eyes, so reality seems to jump around a lot as I see slight differences in my surroundings. Again, I can clearly see *and* feel many versions of myself in one location, with slight variations due I think to them existing in different Universes with very slightly different outcomes. Perhaps in one my head is in one location, but in the next it's a half-inch to the right. That sort of thing.
I said that there was nothing new to report, but last night there was. While sitting in this many-minds state, I suddenly felt a strong tickle in my throat that presaged a cough, no doubt due to the fact that I'd just smoked. I didn't want to cough, because I was in such a serene place. That's when I noticed something quite remarkable. Not all of me needed to cough. Let me re-phrase that. Most of the versions of me needed to cough, but I noticed outliers that had no tickle in their throat, no need to cough at all. So my focus quite naturally went to one of those, and I literally felt the other versions that needed to cough "move away" somehow, not in space but in probability. I now occupied one of the versions of me that felt no need to cough, and indeed, I no longer did. I even tried to cough, to see if the irritation was still there. Nope. Gone.
This corresponds with other phenomena I have seen and felt, and indeed explains them. Awakening the dog or the wife, for instance. I am not awakening them with psychic energy. What I am doing is selecting one Universe out of the many in which they happen to awaken, focusing on it, and "becoming" it. Causing it to become my primary Universe in which I exist. So it then happens as if I had psychically caused it, when I was only selecting that outcome out of the many, perhaps infinite possibilities.
When I am in this "many-minds" state, existing as a superimposed cloud of "myselves" all in one location, I also pick up on what seems to be interference between Universes. Hard to explain. It's like sometimes I see many, many universes at once and it fills my mind with the sheer amount of data all coming into my visual cortex at the same time. Overload, if you will, seen as an incredible solidity, multiple planes of existence all concentrated in one look, one glance. It fills my mind with overlapping data, or so it seems. It feels like all reality becomes solid and is interpenetrating my mind. It reminds me of a feedback whine in a sound system somehow.
When I am in "many-minds" I always ask myself if this can be just a guy smoking a drug and warping his mind, and I always come back with a resounding "not possible." It's far too real, too glaringly realistic, and too bizarre a thing to be just imagining it. What seems instead to be happening is that I am ingesting a substance that alters my perceptions in such a way as to see what is normally *suppressed.* Salvia seems not to cloud the mind, but to reveal things we normally refuse to see, or simply cannot see. Things far too basic to our existence to even question. The flow of time. How we progress through time, not by staying in the same Universe, but by constantly selecting new Universes in which what we desire, or *fear,* is already happening. Those sorts of very basic things we all take for granted.
All possibilities exist, and seem to actually have some kind of existence, even if unrealized. This is very hard to grasp, even for me as I live it, being able sometimes to see it happening.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
More Adventures In The Multiverse
Friday, June 27, 2014
More Adventures in the Multiverse
I seem to always get multiverse type visions now. I carefully dose myself so that I only hit the margins of a deep trip, skirt around the edges of one, then I feel my whole mind split into many minds.
Last night was amazing. The bureau near my right side, the corner of it I happened to be looking at, became many corners forming a staircase-like shape as it extended into more and more versions of itself. This is not my vision, not my eyes in other words. I can feel one of my minds behind each pair of my eyes, in each universe, if you can believe that. I can clearly feel my mind split up into many minds. This used to disconcert me, but now I actually find it rather pleasant to contemplate many realities at once with many minds at once.
It's not like "double vision only more than two." It's not just the visual effect, definitely not. It's multiple minds, one to go with each of the multiple images that I see. I was relaxed and experimenting with it in the moment, and it passes all tests I can throw at it. It's not a visual thing, it's definitely my mind becoming many minds, all running in parallel.
I see, touch, feel, sense many realities all 'stacked up' on top of each other, and in each one, there I am meditating.
I even feel my mind being replaced with a new almost-identical version, over and over again as time passes into the future. It's very subtle, but I'm so still inside that I can feel it happening.
So in addition to all the multiple universes with multiple minds to go with them, as time passes I clearly sense *discontinuities* of my own mind. It ceases to exist for a microsecond and there it's there again, but it's not the same one as before, it's slightly different, not my old mind with new thoughts, but a new mind containing the new thoughts. It's replaced from second to second, but in "normal mind" I cannot sense the transitions so it appears to be continuous and steady.
Is this what thinking is? Selecting the next proximate universe in which one has their next thought already?
In these meditations I also feel myself thinking with those many minds at once, skipping around from mind to mind as I think. To be honest, not only do I not know if I end in the same mind that I started with, but I actually doubt it very much. I'm pretty sure it's real, and that when I end, it's in a different version, a different reality than my old reality, if it can even be said that that "old reality" existed at all as we like to think of it existing in the first place.
I think we access many minds at once all the time. I think that's how the mind works, by accessing many versions of itself all the time. We literally skip around all versions of reality that are nearly identical to this one, all the time, and think it normal.
More to come soon on this and other things. I've been keeping notes.
More Adventures in the Multiverse
I seem to always get multiverse type visions now. I carefully dose myself so that I only hit the margins of a deep trip, skirt around the edges of one, then I feel my whole mind split into many minds.
Last night was amazing. The bureau near my right side, the corner of it I happened to be looking at, became many corners forming a staircase-like shape as it extended into more and more versions of itself. This is not my vision, not my eyes in other words. I can feel one of my minds behind each pair of my eyes, in each universe, if you can believe that. I can clearly feel my mind split up into many minds. This used to disconcert me, but now I actually find it rather pleasant to contemplate many realities at once with many minds at once.
It's not like "double vision only more than two." It's not just the visual effect, definitely not. It's multiple minds, one to go with each of the multiple images that I see. I was relaxed and experimenting with it in the moment, and it passes all tests I can throw at it. It's not a visual thing, it's definitely my mind becoming many minds, all running in parallel.
I see, touch, feel, sense many realities all 'stacked up' on top of each other, and in each one, there I am meditating.
I even feel my mind being replaced with a new almost-identical version, over and over again as time passes into the future. It's very subtle, but I'm so still inside that I can feel it happening.
So in addition to all the multiple universes with multiple minds to go with them, as time passes I clearly sense *discontinuities* of my own mind. It ceases to exist for a microsecond and there it's there again, but it's not the same one as before, it's slightly different, not my old mind with new thoughts, but a new mind containing the new thoughts. It's replaced from second to second, but in "normal mind" I cannot sense the transitions so it appears to be continuous and steady.
Is this what thinking is? Selecting the next proximate universe in which one has their next thought already?
In these meditations I also feel myself thinking with those many minds at once, skipping around from mind to mind as I think. To be honest, not only do I not know if I end in the same mind that I started with, but I actually doubt it very much. I'm pretty sure it's real, and that when I end, it's in a different version, a different reality than my old reality, if it can even be said that that "old reality" existed at all as we like to think of it existing in the first place.
I think we access many minds at once all the time. I think that's how the mind works, by accessing many versions of itself all the time. We literally skip around all versions of reality that are nearly identical to this one, all the time, and think it normal.
More to come soon on this and other things. I've been keeping notes.
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is It Real?
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is it real?
In all my salvia divinorum experiments, I still have not proven anything as regards the question "is this purely an hallucination?" vs "Is this my mind leaving my one body and experiencing many of my bodies?" Is it all just my mind tricking itself, or is it actually experiencing something, well, for lack of a better term, paranormal?
Because lately, most every time I take it I experience multiple locations at once, multiple "me's" at once. Even feel my body weight bearing down on the chair in many places, many of my bedrooms, at once. It's exactly 50-50 to me if it's a real effect or not. It certainly feels very real, realer than my normal life in fact, but then I factor in how easily we silly hairless apes trick ourselves, and that ties it up again at 50-50. I mean, no way to prove it to myself definitively either way.
One thing for sure though: Even if it's all just fake, I've seen things, experienced things, that I would have never have thought my mind was even remotely capable of faking. I think in a non-human way on salvia now, most of the time. "Non-human" is the best way to describe it. Many thought lines at once, approaching a question from many angles at once, like a group of people all doing it at once on a "party line," incredible flows of convoluted information that no one mind should be able to accomplish or sustain. These lines of thought are also non-verbal. They are pictorial and emotional in nature, but complex concepts actually come much easier in this atypical modality. Non-verbal pictorial, emotion-based convoluted thought-lines that occur in simultaneous "packages" if you will. I stand amazed of that, every time it happens. No way to even accurately describe it to you, it's too different from how we think normally. Maybe like a hive-mind. But I love it. I admit that. I love the amazing feeling of basically accessing many of my own minds at once and thinking not as a man might think, but as a God might, if such things existed.
I should note that I still disturb the (sleeping) dog or the wife or even my son from time to time, although I consciously try not to. Can't prove that, though. I can't do it on purpose. It only happens when I'm in "too deep" to even think of any preconceived plan. So I must remain a skeptical experimenter rather than a convert. Maybe it's my skepticism that prevents me from going further, but I can't totally abandon that, not ever in my life, so I'll still muddle along.
It's never boring.
For instance, here's an example of "Things I Shouldn't Be Able To Do:" I have a ceiling fan. Set to medium speed, which is fairly fast, I can sit in my chair, and on only a light dose of salvia, I can focus my eyes in front of me on the wall, and not move that focus; then, with my peripheral vision alone, never moving my eyes, I can focus on one single moving fan blade above me and easily track it around in circles, my attention never leaving that one speeding fan blade, with my unmoving eyes not focused anywhere near it. I can thus accurately count the RPM's of the fan over my head while looking into my wife's eyes and having a conversation with her about it!
Or I can focus on five, six, or even more points on a wall at once, again with no eye movement. No need to move the eyes, I just move my *attention* and that is not like visual focus; it allows more than one foci at once with ease. And when I say "at once" I literally mean it. My attention does not flicker from one point to the other. It divides into many foci, all at once. And my peripheral vision is very different, much sharper, at all foci.
Just a couple of the many, many phenomena I get to experience. I feel, to be honest, very lucky to have ever found this substance.
On (light doses of) salvia I can experience literally anything that you've ever read about any Yogi experiencing, and more. The so-called "Rising of the Kundalini" for example. It can feel like it practically blows the top of my head off in a rush of white light. I get to experience all that directly rather than just reading about how others have done it after 20-30 years of meditation practice.
(Interestingly, when I do that, the rising of the energy thing, or just normal intense meditation, the crown of my head gets sore, and remains sore all the next day with no salvia in my system)
I also experience something like layers or strata, that my consciousness passes through. Laminations, even. The wild thing about them is, as I pass through one of them, it's like I hear many, many conversations at once, like literally hundreds of people all talking at once, as if the layer was made up of informational content! And I mean, like you're in an auditorium and everyone's having a conversation at once. Again, I have no words to really get the reality of it across to you. I read what I'm typing here, and it's not even close to the experience, but it's as close as I can come. Frustrating.
AND NOW, A PLEA TO MY READERS:
If you're reading this online journal and have had experience with salvia divinorum or any other psychedelic substance, I'd very much like to hear about it and discuss it with you, so please post your first experience, or your wildest experience, or your most significant experience, or whatever you want to share, into the comments section. See, I started this blog for two main reasons. The first and foremost was to have a journal that I would keep my experiences in for my own perusal that was also accessible to others, and the second was to be able to discuss those experiences with said others of like mind. I really am looking for conversations here, and not just an audience for my ego to preen itself in front of. So thank you in advance for saying hello and sharing.
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is it real?
In all my salvia divinorum experiments, I still have not proven anything as regards the question "is this purely an hallucination?" vs "Is this my mind leaving my one body and experiencing many of my bodies?" Is it all just my mind tricking itself, or is it actually experiencing something, well, for lack of a better term, paranormal?
Because lately, most every time I take it I experience multiple locations at once, multiple "me's" at once. Even feel my body weight bearing down on the chair in many places, many of my bedrooms, at once. It's exactly 50-50 to me if it's a real effect or not. It certainly feels very real, realer than my normal life in fact, but then I factor in how easily we silly hairless apes trick ourselves, and that ties it up again at 50-50. I mean, no way to prove it to myself definitively either way.
One thing for sure though: Even if it's all just fake, I've seen things, experienced things, that I would have never have thought my mind was even remotely capable of faking. I think in a non-human way on salvia now, most of the time. "Non-human" is the best way to describe it. Many thought lines at once, approaching a question from many angles at once, like a group of people all doing it at once on a "party line," incredible flows of convoluted information that no one mind should be able to accomplish or sustain. These lines of thought are also non-verbal. They are pictorial and emotional in nature, but complex concepts actually come much easier in this atypical modality. Non-verbal pictorial, emotion-based convoluted thought-lines that occur in simultaneous "packages" if you will. I stand amazed of that, every time it happens. No way to even accurately describe it to you, it's too different from how we think normally. Maybe like a hive-mind. But I love it. I admit that. I love the amazing feeling of basically accessing many of my own minds at once and thinking not as a man might think, but as a God might, if such things existed.
I should note that I still disturb the (sleeping) dog or the wife or even my son from time to time, although I consciously try not to. Can't prove that, though. I can't do it on purpose. It only happens when I'm in "too deep" to even think of any preconceived plan. So I must remain a skeptical experimenter rather than a convert. Maybe it's my skepticism that prevents me from going further, but I can't totally abandon that, not ever in my life, so I'll still muddle along.
It's never boring.
For instance, here's an example of "Things I Shouldn't Be Able To Do:" I have a ceiling fan. Set to medium speed, which is fairly fast, I can sit in my chair, and on only a light dose of salvia, I can focus my eyes in front of me on the wall, and not move that focus; then, with my peripheral vision alone, never moving my eyes, I can focus on one single moving fan blade above me and easily track it around in circles, my attention never leaving that one speeding fan blade, with my unmoving eyes not focused anywhere near it. I can thus accurately count the RPM's of the fan over my head while looking into my wife's eyes and having a conversation with her about it!
Or I can focus on five, six, or even more points on a wall at once, again with no eye movement. No need to move the eyes, I just move my *attention* and that is not like visual focus; it allows more than one foci at once with ease. And when I say "at once" I literally mean it. My attention does not flicker from one point to the other. It divides into many foci, all at once. And my peripheral vision is very different, much sharper, at all foci.
Just a couple of the many, many phenomena I get to experience. I feel, to be honest, very lucky to have ever found this substance.
On (light doses of) salvia I can experience literally anything that you've ever read about any Yogi experiencing, and more. The so-called "Rising of the Kundalini" for example. It can feel like it practically blows the top of my head off in a rush of white light. I get to experience all that directly rather than just reading about how others have done it after 20-30 years of meditation practice.
(Interestingly, when I do that, the rising of the energy thing, or just normal intense meditation, the crown of my head gets sore, and remains sore all the next day with no salvia in my system)
I also experience something like layers or strata, that my consciousness passes through. Laminations, even. The wild thing about them is, as I pass through one of them, it's like I hear many, many conversations at once, like literally hundreds of people all talking at once, as if the layer was made up of informational content! And I mean, like you're in an auditorium and everyone's having a conversation at once. Again, I have no words to really get the reality of it across to you. I read what I'm typing here, and it's not even close to the experience, but it's as close as I can come. Frustrating.
AND NOW, A PLEA TO MY READERS:
If you're reading this online journal and have had experience with salvia divinorum or any other psychedelic substance, I'd very much like to hear about it and discuss it with you, so please post your first experience, or your wildest experience, or your most significant experience, or whatever you want to share, into the comments section. See, I started this blog for two main reasons. The first and foremost was to have a journal that I would keep my experiences in for my own perusal that was also accessible to others, and the second was to be able to discuss those experiences with said others of like mind. I really am looking for conversations here, and not just an audience for my ego to preen itself in front of. So thank you in advance for saying hello and sharing.
Doing Some Research
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Doing Some Research...
I haven't posted anything here for a while, not because I'm not having any interesting salvia experiences but because I've been pursuing an idea, using small doses along with meditation in an attempt to clarify something I've theorized. It's the idea that we are the average of our experiences in all universes, that we actively experience an infinite number of multiple universes at the same time, all of them in which we appear, but each version of ourselves can only remember experiencing that which makes sense in light of the one averaged-out gestalt universe which we are accustomed to believing ourselves a part of. With infinite number of universes happening at this moment in which I exist, what I remember depends on the statistical concentration of universes that are mostly like this one that I (this version of me) seem to 'follow.' My consciousness does experience all the others, but none of them in sufficient statistical prevalence to make a salient impact on the average experience of the many that do not substantially differ one from the other. What I experience as reality is therefore merely a statistical concentration of similar universes that happen to mostly agree one with the other; my consciousness mostly disregards the infinite anomalous ones and notices only those that fit in with what I consider a rational chain of events that follow logically in this universe.
Yes, as you can see, this is very hard to pin down, very difficult to express in words. I'm honestly not quite getting it, not quite communicating it accurately, but I don't think that words exist in any language that will accommodate the true scope of it. Very frustrating, actually.
I'm not nearly convinced yet that this is the case, but I keep getting hints that it may be. Last night I found myself (on salvia) randomly thinking of a chain of events which I had experienced, none of which I can recall now, but a chain of seemingly real events that I eventually realized was totally foreign to my "actual" experiences in this reality. They were making complete sense to me at the time, but what I realized about them at the end there was that they didn't make any sense at all to me in my normal state of mind, because they didn't fit in with my life experiences. Those events that I seemed to be recalling were utterly foreign to my actual experiences, or so they seemed to be. It was as if I were momentarily conscious of an alternate-universe version of myself to whom those events made perfect sense, because that version had had another life into which they fit. As soon as I realized this, it was like the thoughts immediately started to fade out, very rapidly. It was impossible to hold them, and in fact very difficult merely to recall that I'd had such an experience at all. It's like it's forbidden to remember that which does not fit.
I have also noted on several recent occasions that it seemed that my mind was very much like a radio, tuning into one station at a time, and that sometimes on salvia I seem to be able to change the channel, to tune out from this reality and tune into a different one, or even many at once. One time a few days ago the reality that I tuned into seemed to be like some sort of "underchannel" or more accurately perhaps, a "master frequency" that permeated all universes like a series of back doors connected to secret paths in an infinite woodland. Yes, visually it was like being in an infinite forest, with infinite paths going in all possible directions, all very shaded and green and with a general feeling of happiness accompanying the phenomena. It was quite profound.
Somehow I sense that all these apparently disparate things connect. Somehow I will make sense of it. Too often have I sensed directly that what I consider one existence is in reality a superposition of many existences, and I can't seem to let that go.
Thanks for following my quest. Hope to write more soon.
Doing Some Research...
I haven't posted anything here for a while, not because I'm not having any interesting salvia experiences but because I've been pursuing an idea, using small doses along with meditation in an attempt to clarify something I've theorized. It's the idea that we are the average of our experiences in all universes, that we actively experience an infinite number of multiple universes at the same time, all of them in which we appear, but each version of ourselves can only remember experiencing that which makes sense in light of the one averaged-out gestalt universe which we are accustomed to believing ourselves a part of. With infinite number of universes happening at this moment in which I exist, what I remember depends on the statistical concentration of universes that are mostly like this one that I (this version of me) seem to 'follow.' My consciousness does experience all the others, but none of them in sufficient statistical prevalence to make a salient impact on the average experience of the many that do not substantially differ one from the other. What I experience as reality is therefore merely a statistical concentration of similar universes that happen to mostly agree one with the other; my consciousness mostly disregards the infinite anomalous ones and notices only those that fit in with what I consider a rational chain of events that follow logically in this universe.
Yes, as you can see, this is very hard to pin down, very difficult to express in words. I'm honestly not quite getting it, not quite communicating it accurately, but I don't think that words exist in any language that will accommodate the true scope of it. Very frustrating, actually.
I'm not nearly convinced yet that this is the case, but I keep getting hints that it may be. Last night I found myself (on salvia) randomly thinking of a chain of events which I had experienced, none of which I can recall now, but a chain of seemingly real events that I eventually realized was totally foreign to my "actual" experiences in this reality. They were making complete sense to me at the time, but what I realized about them at the end there was that they didn't make any sense at all to me in my normal state of mind, because they didn't fit in with my life experiences. Those events that I seemed to be recalling were utterly foreign to my actual experiences, or so they seemed to be. It was as if I were momentarily conscious of an alternate-universe version of myself to whom those events made perfect sense, because that version had had another life into which they fit. As soon as I realized this, it was like the thoughts immediately started to fade out, very rapidly. It was impossible to hold them, and in fact very difficult merely to recall that I'd had such an experience at all. It's like it's forbidden to remember that which does not fit.
I have also noted on several recent occasions that it seemed that my mind was very much like a radio, tuning into one station at a time, and that sometimes on salvia I seem to be able to change the channel, to tune out from this reality and tune into a different one, or even many at once. One time a few days ago the reality that I tuned into seemed to be like some sort of "underchannel" or more accurately perhaps, a "master frequency" that permeated all universes like a series of back doors connected to secret paths in an infinite woodland. Yes, visually it was like being in an infinite forest, with infinite paths going in all possible directions, all very shaded and green and with a general feeling of happiness accompanying the phenomena. It was quite profound.
Somehow I sense that all these apparently disparate things connect. Somehow I will make sense of it. Too often have I sensed directly that what I consider one existence is in reality a superposition of many existences, and I can't seem to let that go.
Thanks for following my quest. Hope to write more soon.
Inside Outside
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Inside Outside
In your imagination, do you ever wish that you could meet people and talk to people? Actually, I mean. So that they'd remember it, too, and talk back. Telepathy. Against the rules of reality, though.
Or is it? I am talking to you in my imagination right now. The only difference this is from telepathy, is that you agree that it's just a computer. You agree that this is not in my imagination, and not in your imagination, but in our mutual reality.
Well, I was just thinking (on salvia) a few minutes ago and I realized that my imagination is everything that I think, the totality of my "inside world." And when I see a room around my body as I do now typing this, that room is in my imagination, too. This computer is in my imagination. It's inside of that imaginary room I just talked about.
My imagination is an infinite sea of thoughts and visions and dreams and stories and plot lines and songs and happiness and sorrow, intense visual scenes and bizarre vistas, and mundane, normal things. I can think of any and all of the things in it, because it is my imagination.
There are parts of that vast inner world however, where I find other beings apparently, much like me, only where I am imagining them, they are also imagining me, and where those two things intersect, we agree that what we are seeing and what we are doing, is real. We agree that each other is real.
I found an island in my imagination, and there are people there, and we all agree that that island is real and is definitely not imaginary, and we are very happy about that. Since it's the part of my imagination that we've decided is real, I concentrate on it a lot. I tend to kind-of live there.
Maybe there are other islands in my imagination where I will find other beings that will agree that their tiny part of intersection with my imagination and theirs is real, too. What fun! Imagining each other into being. For it's all just in my imagination, only you are there too. You see me and I see you and we both agree that this part of our imagination, this island where we find each other, is definitely real, and so are we. We're as real as this part of our mutual imagination has managed to explain and justify to us.
Reality is the part of my imagination that everyone else believes is real, too.
In my inside, I found the outside.
Inside Outside
In your imagination, do you ever wish that you could meet people and talk to people? Actually, I mean. So that they'd remember it, too, and talk back. Telepathy. Against the rules of reality, though.
Or is it? I am talking to you in my imagination right now. The only difference this is from telepathy, is that you agree that it's just a computer. You agree that this is not in my imagination, and not in your imagination, but in our mutual reality.
Well, I was just thinking (on salvia) a few minutes ago and I realized that my imagination is everything that I think, the totality of my "inside world." And when I see a room around my body as I do now typing this, that room is in my imagination, too. This computer is in my imagination. It's inside of that imaginary room I just talked about.
My imagination is an infinite sea of thoughts and visions and dreams and stories and plot lines and songs and happiness and sorrow, intense visual scenes and bizarre vistas, and mundane, normal things. I can think of any and all of the things in it, because it is my imagination.
There are parts of that vast inner world however, where I find other beings apparently, much like me, only where I am imagining them, they are also imagining me, and where those two things intersect, we agree that what we are seeing and what we are doing, is real. We agree that each other is real.
I found an island in my imagination, and there are people there, and we all agree that that island is real and is definitely not imaginary, and we are very happy about that. Since it's the part of my imagination that we've decided is real, I concentrate on it a lot. I tend to kind-of live there.
Maybe there are other islands in my imagination where I will find other beings that will agree that their tiny part of intersection with my imagination and theirs is real, too. What fun! Imagining each other into being. For it's all just in my imagination, only you are there too. You see me and I see you and we both agree that this part of our imagination, this island where we find each other, is definitely real, and so are we. We're as real as this part of our mutual imagination has managed to explain and justify to us.
Reality is the part of my imagination that everyone else believes is real, too.
In my inside, I found the outside.
Multiple Plane Overlap
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Multiple Plane Overlap
Last night, sitting meditation in upright chair, 100x. Eyes closed at first, then later opened as I came back into my body.
I was very relaxed and calm, when I was suddenly immersed in a maelstrom of sensations that at first was very hard to decipher. I was totally wrapped up in it for a while before I even thought to try, but as I slowly came back to my senses while still in it I realized that what I was experiencing was nothing less than many, many realities all overlapping mine simultaneously.
This is, once again, almost impossible to describe, but the best that I can do is to say that it was a very clear realization of multiple realities all in the same place, as if instead of being tuned to one radio station somehow my radio was picking up all of them at once and playing them all overlapping in a mish-mash. I could see and sense and even feel kinesthetically somehow, many realities all stacked on each other, on me, on the space that my body and mind occupied; a very large number of “other spaces” all at once. Not all of them had me in them; many were occupied by other people, strangers, and perhaps some had other, different versions of me in them, hard to say. Many were definitely occupied, at any rate. Conversations were going on in some of them. I could hear them at the time, but their content was lost to me later, as often happens with salvia.
It was like being underwater in a way, a feeling of being immersed, but not in water but in multiple planes of existence. I did not see and feel one reality after the other sequentially; what I saw and felt was many realities all at once, like superimposed immersive videos. Many seemed to be a version of my room; many were different, seeming to not even be my room at all. Some seemed to not even be inside a building, but outdoors. I could clearly sense other beings, other people being present in many of them, just living their lives, doing things, talking, and so forth.
There were so many realities superimposed one on top of the other that I couldn’t begin to sort them out enough to find the one that I was originally in at first. I was lost in them, in a sensory overload of information stacked on information, senses of people and places that were all superimposed in the same place at the same time.
This was very different from my many experiences of me being personally in multiple planes. In a way it was the opposite. In those experiences I was present in many places at once, in multiple bodies; in this one many “places” were present simultaneously around only one of me.
It was as if I had consciousness of not just my one reality, but all parallel realities that existed in the same space, and there were a lot of them.
Slowly as the salvia effect wore off, I saw/felt my familiar reality getting “louder” in the sense that it was as if it was occupying more “bandwidth” in this experience, and as it started to stand out to me against all the other planes of existence, I concentrated on it and then suddenly I clawed my way (metaphorically) back into my body and my room, like slowly clawing my way out of a river onto the safety of its bank.
So there I sat in my chair, having not moved a muscle throughout all of this, with the maelstrom still raging in front of me but lessening moment by moment, and as seemed to recede, to lessen, those now-familiar glowing lines of spatial distortion began to twist the very space in my bedroom into folds and ripples. As this started to happen, in that exact, precise moment I heard my dog who was sound asleep on the bed all this time about six feet away begin to cry out with soft muffled barks in his sleep as if terrified, and then wake up.
This happened (as usual) at the exact, precise moment that the lines of ‘spatial distortion’ began to twist around the room. As soon as the softly glowing lines of distortion began to reach the approximate point where the dog was sleeping, he started to whine, and then awakened.
This was also in no way premeditated on my part. I didn’t try to awaken the dog. I had the overlapping-realities experience, and then as the room began to distort afterwards, the whining of the dog was just there, acting as a counterpoint to the strange visual effects of the room twisting.
I was motionless and silent as a stone all the time.
So once again, my sleeping dog was awakened, and clearly frightened, by my salvia hallucinations.
I don’t think they’re hallucinations. My skeptical side is starting to have real problems dismissing the fact that the dog or sometimes my wife and the dog are clearly and fairly consistently being disturbed by what science would say was a man sitting in silence having a hallucination.
I think that somehow the effect of the salvia along with me being in meditation, instead of causing me to see things that aren’t really there, are causing me to see things that are really there that my mind was filtering out before. That everybody’s mind filters out.
Again, the only logical conclusion to this is that the Universe is not what it seems, that it is more likely some sort of communal dream state, one with multiple planes of existence. Perhaps a Type III or IV Multiverse, only based in consciousness as it’s ground. Multiple simultaneous intersecting and overlapping communal dream states. After all, my dog isn’t the one taking salvia. If this were the kind of Universe that most people think it is, one of actual matter and energy and time and space, then no other being should be able to sense my visions in any way.
That is clearly not the case. And this is not confirmation bias. It's too consistent and dramatic to be that. I've pretty much ruled that out.
Still a mystery, though.
Fortunately, I like mysteries.
Multiple Plane Overlap
Last night, sitting meditation in upright chair, 100x. Eyes closed at first, then later opened as I came back into my body.
I was very relaxed and calm, when I was suddenly immersed in a maelstrom of sensations that at first was very hard to decipher. I was totally wrapped up in it for a while before I even thought to try, but as I slowly came back to my senses while still in it I realized that what I was experiencing was nothing less than many, many realities all overlapping mine simultaneously.
This is, once again, almost impossible to describe, but the best that I can do is to say that it was a very clear realization of multiple realities all in the same place, as if instead of being tuned to one radio station somehow my radio was picking up all of them at once and playing them all overlapping in a mish-mash. I could see and sense and even feel kinesthetically somehow, many realities all stacked on each other, on me, on the space that my body and mind occupied; a very large number of “other spaces” all at once. Not all of them had me in them; many were occupied by other people, strangers, and perhaps some had other, different versions of me in them, hard to say. Many were definitely occupied, at any rate. Conversations were going on in some of them. I could hear them at the time, but their content was lost to me later, as often happens with salvia.
It was like being underwater in a way, a feeling of being immersed, but not in water but in multiple planes of existence. I did not see and feel one reality after the other sequentially; what I saw and felt was many realities all at once, like superimposed immersive videos. Many seemed to be a version of my room; many were different, seeming to not even be my room at all. Some seemed to not even be inside a building, but outdoors. I could clearly sense other beings, other people being present in many of them, just living their lives, doing things, talking, and so forth.
There were so many realities superimposed one on top of the other that I couldn’t begin to sort them out enough to find the one that I was originally in at first. I was lost in them, in a sensory overload of information stacked on information, senses of people and places that were all superimposed in the same place at the same time.
This was very different from my many experiences of me being personally in multiple planes. In a way it was the opposite. In those experiences I was present in many places at once, in multiple bodies; in this one many “places” were present simultaneously around only one of me.
It was as if I had consciousness of not just my one reality, but all parallel realities that existed in the same space, and there were a lot of them.
Slowly as the salvia effect wore off, I saw/felt my familiar reality getting “louder” in the sense that it was as if it was occupying more “bandwidth” in this experience, and as it started to stand out to me against all the other planes of existence, I concentrated on it and then suddenly I clawed my way (metaphorically) back into my body and my room, like slowly clawing my way out of a river onto the safety of its bank.
So there I sat in my chair, having not moved a muscle throughout all of this, with the maelstrom still raging in front of me but lessening moment by moment, and as seemed to recede, to lessen, those now-familiar glowing lines of spatial distortion began to twist the very space in my bedroom into folds and ripples. As this started to happen, in that exact, precise moment I heard my dog who was sound asleep on the bed all this time about six feet away begin to cry out with soft muffled barks in his sleep as if terrified, and then wake up.
This happened (as usual) at the exact, precise moment that the lines of ‘spatial distortion’ began to twist around the room. As soon as the softly glowing lines of distortion began to reach the approximate point where the dog was sleeping, he started to whine, and then awakened.
This was also in no way premeditated on my part. I didn’t try to awaken the dog. I had the overlapping-realities experience, and then as the room began to distort afterwards, the whining of the dog was just there, acting as a counterpoint to the strange visual effects of the room twisting.
I was motionless and silent as a stone all the time.
So once again, my sleeping dog was awakened, and clearly frightened, by my salvia hallucinations.
I don’t think they’re hallucinations. My skeptical side is starting to have real problems dismissing the fact that the dog or sometimes my wife and the dog are clearly and fairly consistently being disturbed by what science would say was a man sitting in silence having a hallucination.
I think that somehow the effect of the salvia along with me being in meditation, instead of causing me to see things that aren’t really there, are causing me to see things that are really there that my mind was filtering out before. That everybody’s mind filters out.
Again, the only logical conclusion to this is that the Universe is not what it seems, that it is more likely some sort of communal dream state, one with multiple planes of existence. Perhaps a Type III or IV Multiverse, only based in consciousness as it’s ground. Multiple simultaneous intersecting and overlapping communal dream states. After all, my dog isn’t the one taking salvia. If this were the kind of Universe that most people think it is, one of actual matter and energy and time and space, then no other being should be able to sense my visions in any way.
That is clearly not the case. And this is not confirmation bias. It's too consistent and dramatic to be that. I've pretty much ruled that out.
Still a mystery, though.
Fortunately, I like mysteries.
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
I am driving to a nearby city to meet a friend of my wife’s, on an errand. It’s a clear, sunny day. I approach the apartment complex that she lives in. I have never been here before. It is very large, much larger than I’d anticipated. It also has more the look of a professional building to it, or perhaps a hospital. There are several large main buildings; I approach the one given in the directions. I park my car and enter the building.
I walk down long corridors. There are people everywhere. It’s filled with people. It’s definitely more of a hospital, but somehow that doesn’t disturb me. I’m here to find room number 6N.
I ask directions of a passer-by; he doesn't seem to know, or really that interested in answering me. He seemed a bit "out of it."
Perhaps it’s a mental hospital combined with geriatric care? So it would seem, except for the ridiculous number of visitors. Every hall is crowded, every room filled, every space bustling.
I finally find someone, an employee, who guides me to the correct room. I had been on the wrong floor apparently. The elevator was very crowded, and we had to wait in queue for several minutes just to get one. We rode up several floors.
The room was off a narrow hallway with a great room nearby, perhaps a nurse’s station and recreation area combined. The door is open, but there is no-one inside that would fit the description of my wife’s friend. What was her name again? I look at the slip of paper that my wife had written the room number down on, but she had neglected to write her name. I should remember it, but I don’t.
The room is not any kind of an apartment. It’s more like a hospital room. One patient in a bed, several people visiting her. So this cannot be the right room.
Suddenly a maintenance worker, perhaps a janitor, hails me by name. “Brian!” An elderly black man in janitor’s clothing is calling to me. He is standing in the hall a short way behind me, near a public telephone on the wall. He hails me again, so I approach him. I’d never seen him before in my life.
“Brian! Good to see you!”
“Hello. Um, where do I know you from?”
“I remember you from that book that you wrote!” He mentions a title but I didn’t catch it, and it didn’t sound familiar anyhow.
(I have never written a book. Even if I had, why would he remember me personally from reading it?)
We chatted for a short while, but he never revealed anything more about said book or our supposed previous acquaintance. I eventually asked him if he knew where room 6N was, and he informed me that I was in the wrong building.
I said to myself “Well, that makes sense, because there’s nothing residential about this one!”
We said goodbye, and I walked back toward the elevators. When I got back to them, I was dismayed by the long lines of people waiting to use them. I said ‘to hell with this’ and found a stairwell.
I walked back down the four floors (or so) to ground level down a crowded stairwell. I had the thought that I should call my wife to ask her the name of her friend and anything else more that she could tell me, but when I took out my cell phone, it was not mine. It was an unfamiliar model, not a smartphone, with few buttons, and no clear indication how to dial out. I was dismayed that I’d apparently somehow dropped my phone and picked up someone else’s.
Still searching for my phone, I find two others on my person, neither one mine, and both with no apparent way to actually dial a number. Too few buttons, and concealed keyboard on one that meant little to me. I tried a couple of buttons, tried to enter my wife’s phone number, but nothing happened.
I continued walking, somewhat disturbed by all these developments.
I eventually found someone that informed me that the building that I was seeking was accessed through the back exit, so I left out the rear.
The view from out the rear entrance was a collection of buildings, large and small, leading down perhaps a quarter-mile to a waterfront with massive barges anchored in place to extend the useable surface area of the shoreline, and collections of stores and restaurants and other large edifices, with a railway and transit station or something similar. There was even an entire fenced-in abandoned carnival with Ferris wheel, in a sad state of disrepair. There were people everywhere, except in the carnival apparently.
Seeing no building such as was described to me, I try to walk around the building that I just exited to its front, but the walk seemed to just go on and on, past the railway with railway workers busy doing whatever it is that they do, past many more large open spaces crowded with people and more buildings and roads and even vehicles. Busses. My walk just kept revealing even more large vistas with more complex buildings and of course, more people *everywhere.* I was constantly threading my way through crowds.
Strangely, the people all seemed incredibly apathetic, dazed even. Sad. Wistful.
There seemed to be no clear path to the front of the original building; in fact I could not even be sure that the building that I was walking around *was* the original building at that point. I felt as if I could walk forever and never get anywhere at all.
People were everywhere. Walking, sitting, talking, going about various tasks in a mechanical fashion. Many were just sitting around doing nothing at all.
I began to realize that I could not get back to my car. That indeed, I could not find any indication of any parking area anywhere. A slight panic began to set in.
I reversed direction and went back to the back area, the waterfront with the barges. It was a very long walk, but I eventually made my way back there.
There was a large open area there that I'd seen before, unpaved, with picnic tables in rows, crowded with people. I began to walk down the center of that area toward the waterfront.
“BRIAN!”
I turned at the sound of my name being called out. A young woman approached me, having been seated at one of the tables. “Brian?”
I did not recognize her. I’d never seen her before in my life.
“Brian! How are you?”
“Hello. I’m fine. I’m afraid that I do not know who you are though. Have we met?”
“You don’t remember me? We worked on that political campaign together!”
(I had never worked on any political campaign in my life)
“Um, no. I can’t seem to remember you. Sorry.”
We began to talk.
“What is this place?” I asked her.
“-I don’t know.” (she seemed confused)
“How long have you been here?”
A slightly panicked look crosses her face, then confusion.
“-How long? Why, I don’t know. I don’t know…” (Seems very confused now)
“-…I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It could have been years.”
It could have been years. It could have been years?
Then it began to sink into me. I started to put it all together in my mind. It all clicked.
I was dead. She was dead. This is where dead people go, at least at first. Some sort of waiting area perhaps. Everybody here, was dead. Unaware of it, but dead.
“I think we’re dead” I informed her. "I think this is some sort of afterlife. We're all dead..."
-"Oh, really?"
She seemed accepting of this, strangely. No arguments. No sign of fear or apprehension. Complacent, even.
We walked around some more together, conversing a bit, and as I looked around at the crowds, and at her, I began to realize that it wasn’t so much apathy that I was seeing, but people living totally in-the-moment, with no recollection of the past unless someone like me happened along and questioned them about it or otherwise jostle their memories. It would for instance not occur to any of them to eat, since they felt no hunger. It would not occur to any of them to question their present circumstances either, since they were existing in the present, with no thoughts of past or future. This is what I was seeing. Semi-amnesiac people with no thoughts of the past or future, just *being* in the present moment at all times, doing whatever felt right in those circumstances in that moment, and nothing more. No panic, no happiness, no sadness, just being there, in a daze.
I thought of my wife, whom I would apparently not be driving home to now. Did I crash the car on my way to meet her friend, and wind up here in some strange apathetic vestibule of the afterlife? Perhaps.
I can’t find my car. Why is that so familiar to me? What does that mean to me?
I CAN'T FIND MY CAR!
Suddenly it hit me. I’ve been in this place before, or at least in many places like it. I often dream of a strange place full of apathetic people where I cannot leave, cannot find my car, or bicycle, or whatever mode of transportation brought me there; and cannot find any way out. In my recurring dreams, I come here often.
Having had dreams like this before, I had taken the time to condition myself to take special notice of the concept “I cannot find my car.” To realize, whenever that happens and I am lost and can’t find my way home, that it is a dream that I am in. A dream, but one that happens to me over and over, with variations on the plot, but the basic concept the same. One that happens to me so often, that I installed precautionary measures.
“I cannot find my car”
This is a dream.
I became fully aware at that moment.
From that point onward, it was a lucid dream.
But, what a dream! I looked around again with new eyes. This was no dream, surely! It was just as detailed as my waking consciousness, just as realistic. The sun shone overhead, the buildings, the water, the people all so clear, so real. All the details were there, even a slight breeze. I actually began to doubt that I was right. Surely this was not a dream, could not be a dream… It was as real as what I call my reality. Just as real, even knowing that it was not. I took my time to look around, at all the activity, all the people, all the details. Wow. Maybe the other dreams were premonitions of this, and this one was real? Maybe I am dead?
Then and there, taking no more notice of my companion, I knelt there on the dirt and closed my eyes and began to meditate. To meditate within a dream, to awaken from the dream.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to awaken. I knelt there for a while, concentrating on awakening. Or perhaps more accurately on remembering my reality, my life, which is how I awaken from a dream, or from a salvia vision for that matter.
There. That's it.
I felt no transition at that point. I merely opened my eyes, and got out of bed.
You see, while I don’t have visions of the afterlife on salvia divinorum, I do have them in my regular dreams ever since starting to take salvia divinorum. Recurring dreams of a limbo-like afterlife heavily populated by the recently departed, and perhaps also by those yet alive but asleep and dreaming, all willing to wait forever in their state of ‘life-in-the-moment’ with no sense of anything but their present millisecond of being, of doing whatever they're doing, hence no panic, no fear, no regrets, just sitting around waiting for something while not being aware that they are.
This one was by far the clearest and most detailed of all such dreams that I have experienced, and so convincing that I almost bought into it myself. Almost.*
So was it merely a dream? Maybe. Then again, maybe this reality is one, too. It certainly seemed no different in kind from my waking life except for unlikely details that seemed to fit in there but would not here.
Why did I meet people that knew me from events that had never occurred to me? Another good question.
Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it matters more than almost anything else. No way to tell, till I finally die and see for myself.
Ironically, if it’s really where we go after we die, I doubt I’ll notice then, either. I’ll be too busy being in-the-moment.
*As to the detail of this dream, upon reading what I've written above, I realize that I provided a noticeable lack thereof. Not so in the actual dream, I assure you. All details were filled in; where they are omitted is where I cannot remember them. I do however remember that they were all there, because I recalled most of them immediately upon awakening, and in those few minutes that I had before they slipped away, I made the effort to at least force myself to remember the fact that those details were definitely all there. I conversed with a few more people in passing, I saw many more details of the buildings, the waterfront, the inside of the Hospital, and the crowds. Even surrounding forests in the distance, if I recall correctly. It was all very coherent and clear as glass. So clear that in point of fact, upon awakening from it I experienced as severe a shock as if you, reading this, were to awaken right now at this moment, awaken from this reality, or rather this dream of a reality, awaken in some other reality, a familiar one that had merely slipped your mind, and realize that this reality here where you are reading this now, was just a dream, too. That level of shock.
How would that feel to you?
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
I am driving to a nearby city to meet a friend of my wife’s, on an errand. It’s a clear, sunny day. I approach the apartment complex that she lives in. I have never been here before. It is very large, much larger than I’d anticipated. It also has more the look of a professional building to it, or perhaps a hospital. There are several large main buildings; I approach the one given in the directions. I park my car and enter the building.
I walk down long corridors. There are people everywhere. It’s filled with people. It’s definitely more of a hospital, but somehow that doesn’t disturb me. I’m here to find room number 6N.
I ask directions of a passer-by; he doesn't seem to know, or really that interested in answering me. He seemed a bit "out of it."
Perhaps it’s a mental hospital combined with geriatric care? So it would seem, except for the ridiculous number of visitors. Every hall is crowded, every room filled, every space bustling.
I finally find someone, an employee, who guides me to the correct room. I had been on the wrong floor apparently. The elevator was very crowded, and we had to wait in queue for several minutes just to get one. We rode up several floors.
The room was off a narrow hallway with a great room nearby, perhaps a nurse’s station and recreation area combined. The door is open, but there is no-one inside that would fit the description of my wife’s friend. What was her name again? I look at the slip of paper that my wife had written the room number down on, but she had neglected to write her name. I should remember it, but I don’t.
The room is not any kind of an apartment. It’s more like a hospital room. One patient in a bed, several people visiting her. So this cannot be the right room.
Suddenly a maintenance worker, perhaps a janitor, hails me by name. “Brian!” An elderly black man in janitor’s clothing is calling to me. He is standing in the hall a short way behind me, near a public telephone on the wall. He hails me again, so I approach him. I’d never seen him before in my life.
“Brian! Good to see you!”
“Hello. Um, where do I know you from?”
“I remember you from that book that you wrote!” He mentions a title but I didn’t catch it, and it didn’t sound familiar anyhow.
(I have never written a book. Even if I had, why would he remember me personally from reading it?)
We chatted for a short while, but he never revealed anything more about said book or our supposed previous acquaintance. I eventually asked him if he knew where room 6N was, and he informed me that I was in the wrong building.
I said to myself “Well, that makes sense, because there’s nothing residential about this one!”
We said goodbye, and I walked back toward the elevators. When I got back to them, I was dismayed by the long lines of people waiting to use them. I said ‘to hell with this’ and found a stairwell.
I walked back down the four floors (or so) to ground level down a crowded stairwell. I had the thought that I should call my wife to ask her the name of her friend and anything else more that she could tell me, but when I took out my cell phone, it was not mine. It was an unfamiliar model, not a smartphone, with few buttons, and no clear indication how to dial out. I was dismayed that I’d apparently somehow dropped my phone and picked up someone else’s.
Still searching for my phone, I find two others on my person, neither one mine, and both with no apparent way to actually dial a number. Too few buttons, and concealed keyboard on one that meant little to me. I tried a couple of buttons, tried to enter my wife’s phone number, but nothing happened.
I continued walking, somewhat disturbed by all these developments.
I eventually found someone that informed me that the building that I was seeking was accessed through the back exit, so I left out the rear.
The view from out the rear entrance was a collection of buildings, large and small, leading down perhaps a quarter-mile to a waterfront with massive barges anchored in place to extend the useable surface area of the shoreline, and collections of stores and restaurants and other large edifices, with a railway and transit station or something similar. There was even an entire fenced-in abandoned carnival with Ferris wheel, in a sad state of disrepair. There were people everywhere, except in the carnival apparently.
Seeing no building such as was described to me, I try to walk around the building that I just exited to its front, but the walk seemed to just go on and on, past the railway with railway workers busy doing whatever it is that they do, past many more large open spaces crowded with people and more buildings and roads and even vehicles. Busses. My walk just kept revealing even more large vistas with more complex buildings and of course, more people *everywhere.* I was constantly threading my way through crowds.
Strangely, the people all seemed incredibly apathetic, dazed even. Sad. Wistful.
There seemed to be no clear path to the front of the original building; in fact I could not even be sure that the building that I was walking around *was* the original building at that point. I felt as if I could walk forever and never get anywhere at all.
People were everywhere. Walking, sitting, talking, going about various tasks in a mechanical fashion. Many were just sitting around doing nothing at all.
I began to realize that I could not get back to my car. That indeed, I could not find any indication of any parking area anywhere. A slight panic began to set in.
I reversed direction and went back to the back area, the waterfront with the barges. It was a very long walk, but I eventually made my way back there.
There was a large open area there that I'd seen before, unpaved, with picnic tables in rows, crowded with people. I began to walk down the center of that area toward the waterfront.
“BRIAN!”
I turned at the sound of my name being called out. A young woman approached me, having been seated at one of the tables. “Brian?”
I did not recognize her. I’d never seen her before in my life.
“Brian! How are you?”
“Hello. I’m fine. I’m afraid that I do not know who you are though. Have we met?”
“You don’t remember me? We worked on that political campaign together!”
(I had never worked on any political campaign in my life)
“Um, no. I can’t seem to remember you. Sorry.”
We began to talk.
“What is this place?” I asked her.
“-I don’t know.” (she seemed confused)
“How long have you been here?”
A slightly panicked look crosses her face, then confusion.
“-How long? Why, I don’t know. I don’t know…” (Seems very confused now)
“-…I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It could have been years.”
It could have been years. It could have been years?
Then it began to sink into me. I started to put it all together in my mind. It all clicked.
I was dead. She was dead. This is where dead people go, at least at first. Some sort of waiting area perhaps. Everybody here, was dead. Unaware of it, but dead.
“I think we’re dead” I informed her. "I think this is some sort of afterlife. We're all dead..."
-"Oh, really?"
She seemed accepting of this, strangely. No arguments. No sign of fear or apprehension. Complacent, even.
We walked around some more together, conversing a bit, and as I looked around at the crowds, and at her, I began to realize that it wasn’t so much apathy that I was seeing, but people living totally in-the-moment, with no recollection of the past unless someone like me happened along and questioned them about it or otherwise jostle their memories. It would for instance not occur to any of them to eat, since they felt no hunger. It would not occur to any of them to question their present circumstances either, since they were existing in the present, with no thoughts of past or future. This is what I was seeing. Semi-amnesiac people with no thoughts of the past or future, just *being* in the present moment at all times, doing whatever felt right in those circumstances in that moment, and nothing more. No panic, no happiness, no sadness, just being there, in a daze.
I thought of my wife, whom I would apparently not be driving home to now. Did I crash the car on my way to meet her friend, and wind up here in some strange apathetic vestibule of the afterlife? Perhaps.
I can’t find my car. Why is that so familiar to me? What does that mean to me?
I CAN'T FIND MY CAR!
Suddenly it hit me. I’ve been in this place before, or at least in many places like it. I often dream of a strange place full of apathetic people where I cannot leave, cannot find my car, or bicycle, or whatever mode of transportation brought me there; and cannot find any way out. In my recurring dreams, I come here often.
Having had dreams like this before, I had taken the time to condition myself to take special notice of the concept “I cannot find my car.” To realize, whenever that happens and I am lost and can’t find my way home, that it is a dream that I am in. A dream, but one that happens to me over and over, with variations on the plot, but the basic concept the same. One that happens to me so often, that I installed precautionary measures.
“I cannot find my car”
This is a dream.
I became fully aware at that moment.
From that point onward, it was a lucid dream.
But, what a dream! I looked around again with new eyes. This was no dream, surely! It was just as detailed as my waking consciousness, just as realistic. The sun shone overhead, the buildings, the water, the people all so clear, so real. All the details were there, even a slight breeze. I actually began to doubt that I was right. Surely this was not a dream, could not be a dream… It was as real as what I call my reality. Just as real, even knowing that it was not. I took my time to look around, at all the activity, all the people, all the details. Wow. Maybe the other dreams were premonitions of this, and this one was real? Maybe I am dead?
Then and there, taking no more notice of my companion, I knelt there on the dirt and closed my eyes and began to meditate. To meditate within a dream, to awaken from the dream.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to awaken. I knelt there for a while, concentrating on awakening. Or perhaps more accurately on remembering my reality, my life, which is how I awaken from a dream, or from a salvia vision for that matter.
There. That's it.
I felt no transition at that point. I merely opened my eyes, and got out of bed.
You see, while I don’t have visions of the afterlife on salvia divinorum, I do have them in my regular dreams ever since starting to take salvia divinorum. Recurring dreams of a limbo-like afterlife heavily populated by the recently departed, and perhaps also by those yet alive but asleep and dreaming, all willing to wait forever in their state of ‘life-in-the-moment’ with no sense of anything but their present millisecond of being, of doing whatever they're doing, hence no panic, no fear, no regrets, just sitting around waiting for something while not being aware that they are.
This one was by far the clearest and most detailed of all such dreams that I have experienced, and so convincing that I almost bought into it myself. Almost.*
So was it merely a dream? Maybe. Then again, maybe this reality is one, too. It certainly seemed no different in kind from my waking life except for unlikely details that seemed to fit in there but would not here.
Why did I meet people that knew me from events that had never occurred to me? Another good question.
Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it matters more than almost anything else. No way to tell, till I finally die and see for myself.
Ironically, if it’s really where we go after we die, I doubt I’ll notice then, either. I’ll be too busy being in-the-moment.
*As to the detail of this dream, upon reading what I've written above, I realize that I provided a noticeable lack thereof. Not so in the actual dream, I assure you. All details were filled in; where they are omitted is where I cannot remember them. I do however remember that they were all there, because I recalled most of them immediately upon awakening, and in those few minutes that I had before they slipped away, I made the effort to at least force myself to remember the fact that those details were definitely all there. I conversed with a few more people in passing, I saw many more details of the buildings, the waterfront, the inside of the Hospital, and the crowds. Even surrounding forests in the distance, if I recall correctly. It was all very coherent and clear as glass. So clear that in point of fact, upon awakening from it I experienced as severe a shock as if you, reading this, were to awaken right now at this moment, awaken from this reality, or rather this dream of a reality, awaken in some other reality, a familiar one that had merely slipped your mind, and realize that this reality here where you are reading this now, was just a dream, too. That level of shock.
How would that feel to you?
STRANGE STUFF
Friday, January 31, 2014
STRANGE STUFF
A collection of short accounts of some incredible salvia divinorum experiences that I’ve had, both bad and good:
-The Current of Life
Deep in an eyes-closed vision, I am a detached viewpoint exploring my own mind, hovering in the vast cavern of my imagination, floating here and there, trying to get closer and closer to my central “I AM” point, floating higher and higher, when I saw a glowing current of a liquid-like substance flowing in “mid-air” overhead like a current of luminescent water. It seemed no more than perhaps a couple of feet across, so a fast stream and not a river. Fascinated, I realized that I could not only see it but feel it somehow, perhaps interact with it even. Resonate with it. So I concentrated on it and attempted to slow it down by willing it to be so. It obeyed my will; it was a part of me. I saw it start to slow as I had desired, and immediately I felt a strong arrhythmia in my heart. I immediately ceased my attempt, it returned to its normal rate of flow, and the uncomfortable sensation in my chest immediately ceased. I tried gently once again to slow it, and once again my heart lurched in my chest. That was enough of an experiment for me.
Make of it what you will. I have no heart problems.
***
-The Manuscript
In an eyes-open vision, standing in my room facing my dresser, I see a rip in reality happen right in front of my chest, maybe a foot away from my chest, perhaps a foot wide and a couple long, aligned long-axis vertical. Through it, through that rent in space, I see my own left arm and hand holding a single page of paper as if to read it. I could also make out a room into which I peered, but with little detail except a sense of antiquity, of age. My actual left arm was at my side, as was my right, however in that room in that reality as seen through that rip, I *was* the person holding that document. It was my arm. I was looking out another man’s eyes, but it seemed to be a version of me, albeit a different version.
It was seemingly from a manuscript or perhaps some old official document. It had a rubric at the beginning. Perhaps even an old Bible page. The writing was hard to see, so I focused my eyes more willfully upon it, concentrating on the act of focusing them and putting intention and will into the effort. The words started to come into focus, and just as I was beginning to be able to read them, I felt cardiac arrhythmia once again, as in the previous account above. Another forbidden thing? I had to be sure, so cautiously I once again began to focus my eyes on the words on that page, and once again, the heart flutter. Then, as if someone had explained it to me all in one instant, in a direct insight I realized that this was the choice that I had before me. Focus on that reality, and die to this one as you *go* to that one.
I made my choice. I’m here, aren’t I?
***
-The Room As Energy
I am in sitting meditation in a deep vision (eyes closed) from which I am just returning. I feel like my body is pure, crackling, static energy. I open my eyes, become aware of my surroundings, stand up, and walk out of my bedroom into the kitchen area. The room around me becomes increasingly “static-y” and I begin to see it as a three-dimensional volume of pure energy, see it in its translucent glory as arrangements of small bits of energy, alive with motion and sparkling scintillations. It was very beautiful, but maintaining my ability to remain focused was becoming more difficult. The trance threatened to take me yet again. I looked down and saw my body as much the same as my surroundings, made of these small parts, each part a unit of energy, an arrangement of building blocks of thought, all working together to form this reality and my own body within it. The room and my body were all an illusion before, the illusion of normalcy, of matter and surfaces, of solids and liquids and gasses; what I was seeing now however was the reality behind that illusion.
And it seemed to me at the time that something didn’t want me to see that, or if I did see it, didn’t want me to remember it.
I felt my body becoming increasingly ‘static-y’ and non-coherent the more I retained focus, and felt crawling sensations all through me; tingling feelings all over verging on tremors, as if a stronger and stronger electrical current were running through every part of me inside and out. It began to border on the painful. I began to feel weaker. I was determined to remember this, but I knew that I would not if I did not record it somehow, so against what my body was telling me (lie down on the floor now or DIE!) I staggered over to where we kept some pens and sticky-notes and grabbed one of each, and in barely legible shaky handwriting I quickly wrote “It’s all made up of little parts” and underlined it, put it down, and collapsed. It was the best I could do, but it turned out to be sufficient to the purpose, because later on upon reading it, it all came back to me. I managed to write it, but I sensed that I was risking my life in doing so, because it was incredibly difficult to force myself even to stand up and it felt like I was fairly close to death, and yet I forced myself and kept forcing myself until I’d finished writing that note to myself. It seemed at the time far too important an experience to forget.
***
-Physical Death Preview
I was doing a meditation in which I was very deep inside my own mind, but I do not recall the nature of this meditation, just that I was apparently fiddling around with something that I shouldn’t have. I remember that I got to a certain point where I had the option to do a certain thing, whatever that was, and I started to do it, when I felt the scariest sensation of my whole life. I felt my body start to die. Now, I’m not saying that it actually was, but I was definitely feeling it as if it was. I felt tiny bits of consciousness all over and through my body, indeed apparently composing my body, start to just *wink out* like snuffed candles.
My own kinesthetic body sense seemed composed of small areas of sensory feedback, all combined to make me. Millions of them. Well, what I was feeling was those tiny centers of consciousness that make up my gestalt consciousness, disappearing. Poof!
They were my body sense, but also my mind itself. I felt small parts of it shutting off, literally going away, like bubbles in a full tub popping and slowly disappearing one by one, and if I let it continue I’d be gone altogether soon enough.
It’s hard to capture in words how this felt. How would you feel if you look down at your body and pieces of it started to go numb and fall off? This was pretty similar, and very scary indeed. Parts of me were simply shutting down. This seemed to me to be just about the worst case scenario for whatever one feels as they’re actually dying, the terror of just seeing it all go away, the terror of feeling parts of your mind simply ceasing to exist, and you along with it.
Of course as soon as I ceased whatever the hell I was doing, it just stopped. That one, I didn’t bother trying again just to be sure.
***
-The Sword
Sitting in trance in a straight-backed chair, eyes open, staring upwards at an angle. I had been meditating for a few minutes, and I was in an intermediate-deep state. I saw hints of motion above and in front of me for a few seconds and I wondered what would appear, but that’s all I had time for when a brightly glowing arc-shaped line of energy that resembled nothing less than a very large curved sword swiftly descended point-first from the upper left (my left) side near the vicinity of the ceiling and stabbed completely through my body on my left side just below my ribcage, exiting out the back and going into the chair. It was instant excruciating pain! I felt it stab completely through my body, seeming to exit just above my left kidney area, pinning me to the chair. I clearly felt the blade inside of me, and the pain followed its path all the way through my side from the skin on the front of my body to the skin on the back. AHHH! That really, really hurt.
I sat there, pinned, and did some breathing exercises and gradually both the sword and the pain faded away, but I came away from the experience thinking that it seemed as if one of my other versions, a doppelganger in some other plane of existence far removed from mine, was just killed by a sword, or at least gravely wounded, and I felt it all happen somehow.
***
-I Lose One Of Me
Meditating lying down, ample light in the room, in trance. Suddenly and with no warning I see and feel a glowing “ghost” of myself, perfect in every detail but translucent and glowing a dim greenish light, exit my body to the left, as if I’d been lying there with two “me’s” perfectly superimposed in one body and one of them just decided to leave.
I felt this “other me” roll out of my body to the left side into the solid wall there, as one might roll off a bed. Inside of my body it felt like half my atoms all left at the same time. I felt a real body, as it seemed, a duplicate of me, leave me.
I felt diminished, “halved” even, and thought “I’ve heard of astral projection, but usually you’re the one projecting out of your body, not the one left behind!
Perhaps it was a rare instance of me being conscious of a splitting point where my universe divided in two, and one of me “went thataway…”
***
-The 90 Degree Turn
This is truly one of the most amazing and startling things that has ever happened to me on salvia.
I am sitting cross-legged on the bed, in a moderate trance, facing the closet at the end of the bedroom.
I am meditating on the point between my eyes.
Suddenly, I rotated ninety degrees to the right. Not my body, no. That remained perfectly still. My consciousness inside of my body rotated smoothly to the right while still inside of my body, and then my face seemed to part the skin of the right side of my head near my ear. I felt something like an elastic membrane parting for me, and then I saw another identical room there with the closet in front of me just like the first one! I could still see the old room, situated at 90 degrees to the new one! I was in between two identical rooms in two (nearly?) identical universes; that was the only explanation. So I popped out of my “old body’s” side completely, leaving the old room behind forever, and now there I sat, still in the identical position, having not moved at all physically, still facing the closet; but I knew that it was not the same closet in the same room, because I had seen the old one and the new one at 90 degree angles to each other before I allowed myself to completely “come into” this new one.
So there I sat, still cross-legged on my bed and facing that closet, totally stunned by what had just happened to me. I had not moved, had not twitched a finger, but my consciousness had rotated to the right and moved into a new cross-legged version of me in a new version of my bedroom. WOW.
***
-The Broken Room
Sitting meditation, cross-legged on the bed, eyes closed. I had just had a somewhat ‘bad trip’ wherein I was stretched into a long elastic sheet and fed into what seemed like a pulley, knowing that when I got to the pulley thing I would “pop” and be destroyed, sensing somehow that this has happened to me many times before. Visions like that are fairly common; being destroyed, atomized, ground up to powder, rolled over by a huge wheel, that sort of thing. Other salvianauts commonly have them too.
Then on coming out of it, I sat there on the bed and opened my eyes. The room was very still and quiet. Then I felt and heard slight tremors and vibrations. Suddenly the room started to literally fracture all over; the walls cracked, and the entire room twisted as if in the hands of a giant. Through the cracks and fissures, clouds of purest blackness started to seep in, what I call “the Outer Darkness,” like clouds of perfectly black ink seeping into a room filled with clear water. I could clearly hear the room fracturing and twisting. This displeased me, so I willed it all to slow down and stop. Then there I was, sitting there, fully aware, eyes open, looking around the room. The cracks were still there, but were no longer progressing, and the clouds of Outer Darkness were still there frozen in time as it were. I looked to my right where my wife was sleeping. A crack had appeared in the wall behind us, between me and her. A cloud of Outer Darkness hung frozen out of that crack, totally obscuring my wife’s face and head from me. Other, large cracks were all over the walls and ceiling, all with pure blackness frozen in the act of seeping through them. The room itself wasn’t even a regular rectangular room shape anymore; it was twisted out of line.
This was not my first encounter with the Outer Darkness. The first time, in meditation, I saw “flames” of it seeping through a shadow on my wall, and watched them flicker for quite a while; the second time was similar but I willed them to come to me and actually spent some time playing with them in my hand, little black flames flickering and dancing on and among my fingers. My wife came into the room at that time, and I asked her “You don’t see these, do you?” nodding toward my open hand. She of course didn’t see anything, but to my eyes they were still there, practically frolicking on my hand. I've never felt more like a sorcerer in my life.
On a couple of other occasions I’d also seen them seeping through small cracks in the room, but never like this Broken Room experience.
Incidentally, I’ve read of shamans speaking of the “outer darkness” or “outer blackness” and beings who dwell there, so that’s why I labeled it that in my head.
***
-A Woman’s Voice
Sitting meditation in a straight-back chair, medium-deep trance, eyes closed. I was visualizing all of creation as a vast cloud of consciousness with the external parts, the outer surfaces if you will, being where we are to be found, as if we lived in just the ‘crust’ of all reality. I then felt a presence, and clearly heard a woman’s voice say something like “yes, this is how it is.” I felt that she was a real being, not my imagination, perhaps even a personification of the ALL. So I thought a bit about what I wanted to say next. I then asked her, “What then of the World’s Pain?” and imagined all the pain and suffering and heartache and death and destruction and terror of this world as I asked it. She replied in the saddest, most resigned tone imaginable “It is unavoidable. It is how it is. Such a pity. Such a shame.”
That’s it. Still, very eerie, let me assure you.
***
-DEMON
I’ve felt like I was dying in several ways, felt my consciousness fade away, been ground to powder, stretched like a rubber sheet and met a Demiurge-like being that was very scary in a satanic kind of way a couple of times, but nothing compares to this for sheer terror.
My Worst Experience on Salvia Ever:
I am standing in my room after a trip, looking at a large quartz crystal that I had on my dresser. It’s a very rare and unusual specimen that I bought on a business trip to Minas Gerais, Brazil. (I am a gemologist by trade)
It was a “phantom” crystal about five inches tall, clear, but with a milky-white lamellar phantom in it. This is another quartz crystal embedded in the larger one, and it was separated into flat planes so it looked like a layer cake. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen or even heard of, and a minerologist that I showed it to was mystified by it as well, as was my local mineral-collector's club.
So I’m staring into it, and something made me have a very, very bad thought. I will not tell you what that thought was, but it was completely unlike me to ever think such a thing. Let’s just say that it was incredibly evil, and involved homicide. The worst thought that I could think of, basically. Awful, disgusting, sick. Not like me at all; I never think such things.
I’m still staring at the crystal as I’m having this thought, and as soon as I had it I thrust it away from me in disgust. That’s when it got really strange. The thought just got stronger! I was starting to literally panic as I tried again and again to rid myself of the thought, but all of my panic simply fed the thought, and it grew and grew. My fear fed it. My attempts to not think it, fed it. I thought to myself “What if I actually did that horrible thing” and that really fed it! Every single thing that I could think of to get rid of it, fed it. Stronger and stronger it became, and as it did, the air in front of the crystal started to take on a strange, pixelated look, then geometric shapes started to form there, odd moving geometry that I could somehow sense was literally causing my mind to start fracturing and breaking like glass. I was going mad! This vicious cycle of thought was shattering my mind! In stark terror now, I could see that it was getting the better of me, and if it won, I’d be stark-raving mad, and even possibly commit acts of disgusting violence, so I really “clamped down” on it and forced myself to *forget the whole thing* by physically moving my body around and turning my head away from the crystal, and other self-distracting physical actions, all the while willing myself to another line of thought. That finally worked, but it was a battle. Phew!
Ever since then, I’ve understood psychosis intuitively. I get it now. It’s a feedback cycle, fed by every attempt to rid yourself from it. I “get” madness now. I really do. The mind is capable of getting involved in a negative feedback cycle from which no apparent exit is possible, and all attempts at breaking it only feed it.
I was utterly terrified the whole time. I’ve even gone so far as to “install” safeguards in my mind against such a thing ever happening to me again. I’m confident that it won’t.
***
-The Potential Ghost
This occurred shortly after the Demon experience outlined above, so I was prepared for mental feedback cycles.
After a salvia meditation in my bedroom I walked out to the kitchen to get a drink. Afterwards as I was walking back to the bedroom, I paused and looked down the hallway. It was very dark in that hallway, and the fact that I’d just done salvia made it look even darker, with more suspicious shadows. It just looked creepy.
So I had a thought that I would try a ‘belief experiment.” Staring down the hall, I (intentionally) thought of how creepy it was, focused on that, and thought that perhaps I could even see movement in that hallway. I was thinking that perhaps seeing ghosts was also a feedback cycle of apprehension or fear, at least sometime, and I wanted to try it. So there I was, looking down the hallway, when I clearly saw a swirl of movement. I allowed myself to feel the “creepy factor,” allowed myself to feel apprehension. Maybe a ghost would appear, maybe I’d see something really scary or gross, maybe maybemaybe… now I was feeling a slight level of actual fear, but only because that was my goal, to feel exactly that.
The swirling started to solidify into a form. A moving form. A human form.
So that’s where I called it, when I ended the experiment. I shut down the feedback cycle in my mind forcibly, the figure disappeared, and I walked down the creepy hallway to the end, now confident that there was nothing to fear. And there wasn’t. So I went back to my room and fell asleep.
I’m fairly confident now that many psychoses, and the hallucinations of the schizophrenic, are in reality just such mental feedback cycles.
***
-Sitting Up While Lying Down
I often meditate sitting up in a straight-backed chair near my bed. So there I was one night, meditating on salvia after tripping out, in a relaxation phase afterwards. I was sitting there upright, my eyes closed, slowly coming back to being myself. After a few minutes of this, I opened my eyes to an astonishing sight: Tonight I was not sitting down in my chair, that’s not what I had done. I was lying down flat on my back in bed. However, I felt myself in an upright, sitting position as if in my chair. My actual body was flat, my legs stretched out in front of me on the bed, but that’s not where I felt them. I felt my legs down beneath me, my feet on the floor. But there’s a bed underneath me! My legs were out of my body, as it were, and were interpenetrating the bed. I’d simply forgotten that I’d gone to bed before this meditation and misremembered it as a sitting one. So there I was, feeling myself in an upright sitting position while actually lying on my back, and I even had some time, a few minutes perhaps, to contemplate this weirdness. Slowly as I tried to sense my actual legs and not my “astral” ones, the latter faded away and my senses returned to normal; now the legs that I saw were at least the legs that I felt!
***
-Pure Gnosis; the Highest Ascent
This was an unusual meditation as I was using certain OTO (OrdoTemploOrientis) energy raising techniques to achieve a very high state of gnosis. It worked.
Eyes closed, deep trance, but aware and cogent.
In the meditation I built my energy up to a peak and released it, launching my consciousness straight upwards.
Suddenly I was flying up and up, through many, many layers that felt almost like I was traveling up through geological strata or something similar. Upwards and upwards my consciousness flew, faster and faster, until I felt myself break through a final layer, a final barrier, and my head and shoulders apparently broke through the floor of a room somewhere. It was as if the floor of the room, while normally solid, was like water to me, and I splashed right through it, just as if I had been on the bottom of a deep swimming pool and had kicked off and then broke forcibly through the surface of the water into the air. I only had perhaps a half-second to see the room, and then I fell back into the “water” of the floor and sunk back down to my body resting in my bedroom, but what I saw in that room bears mentioning: It was a long room, seemingly of modern decor, minimalistic, with an opening at the far end onto a small courtyard perhaps. The courtyard was in full sunlight but the room was somewhat dark by comparison, albeit still easy enough to see in. There was a woman standing about five feet in front of me to my left, one or possibly two other people in the room farther away, and at the farthest part of the room away from me where it opened into the bright courtyard, a man was standing.
It was just as if they were there going about their business, perhaps socializing, in that room, when suddenly I broke up through the floor and interrupted them. They all turned to face me very quickly, as if very startled. The man near the courtyard turned, the woman near me turned, the one or possibly two other figures turned, all seemingly very startled as if in shock to see me there. I got a sense then, from them; a feeling, an intuition, that they were all thinking “this should never happen!” It wasn't like they didn't know what was happening, either. It was as if they knew exactly what was happening and what I was, and they didn't like it.
***
So that’s the end of my little baker's dozen of miscellaneous weird salvia accounts. Hope you enjoyed them.
STRANGE STUFF
A collection of short accounts of some incredible salvia divinorum experiences that I’ve had, both bad and good:
-The Current of Life
Deep in an eyes-closed vision, I am a detached viewpoint exploring my own mind, hovering in the vast cavern of my imagination, floating here and there, trying to get closer and closer to my central “I AM” point, floating higher and higher, when I saw a glowing current of a liquid-like substance flowing in “mid-air” overhead like a current of luminescent water. It seemed no more than perhaps a couple of feet across, so a fast stream and not a river. Fascinated, I realized that I could not only see it but feel it somehow, perhaps interact with it even. Resonate with it. So I concentrated on it and attempted to slow it down by willing it to be so. It obeyed my will; it was a part of me. I saw it start to slow as I had desired, and immediately I felt a strong arrhythmia in my heart. I immediately ceased my attempt, it returned to its normal rate of flow, and the uncomfortable sensation in my chest immediately ceased. I tried gently once again to slow it, and once again my heart lurched in my chest. That was enough of an experiment for me.
Make of it what you will. I have no heart problems.
***
-The Manuscript
In an eyes-open vision, standing in my room facing my dresser, I see a rip in reality happen right in front of my chest, maybe a foot away from my chest, perhaps a foot wide and a couple long, aligned long-axis vertical. Through it, through that rent in space, I see my own left arm and hand holding a single page of paper as if to read it. I could also make out a room into which I peered, but with little detail except a sense of antiquity, of age. My actual left arm was at my side, as was my right, however in that room in that reality as seen through that rip, I *was* the person holding that document. It was my arm. I was looking out another man’s eyes, but it seemed to be a version of me, albeit a different version.
It was seemingly from a manuscript or perhaps some old official document. It had a rubric at the beginning. Perhaps even an old Bible page. The writing was hard to see, so I focused my eyes more willfully upon it, concentrating on the act of focusing them and putting intention and will into the effort. The words started to come into focus, and just as I was beginning to be able to read them, I felt cardiac arrhythmia once again, as in the previous account above. Another forbidden thing? I had to be sure, so cautiously I once again began to focus my eyes on the words on that page, and once again, the heart flutter. Then, as if someone had explained it to me all in one instant, in a direct insight I realized that this was the choice that I had before me. Focus on that reality, and die to this one as you *go* to that one.
I made my choice. I’m here, aren’t I?
***
-The Room As Energy
I am in sitting meditation in a deep vision (eyes closed) from which I am just returning. I feel like my body is pure, crackling, static energy. I open my eyes, become aware of my surroundings, stand up, and walk out of my bedroom into the kitchen area. The room around me becomes increasingly “static-y” and I begin to see it as a three-dimensional volume of pure energy, see it in its translucent glory as arrangements of small bits of energy, alive with motion and sparkling scintillations. It was very beautiful, but maintaining my ability to remain focused was becoming more difficult. The trance threatened to take me yet again. I looked down and saw my body as much the same as my surroundings, made of these small parts, each part a unit of energy, an arrangement of building blocks of thought, all working together to form this reality and my own body within it. The room and my body were all an illusion before, the illusion of normalcy, of matter and surfaces, of solids and liquids and gasses; what I was seeing now however was the reality behind that illusion.
And it seemed to me at the time that something didn’t want me to see that, or if I did see it, didn’t want me to remember it.
I felt my body becoming increasingly ‘static-y’ and non-coherent the more I retained focus, and felt crawling sensations all through me; tingling feelings all over verging on tremors, as if a stronger and stronger electrical current were running through every part of me inside and out. It began to border on the painful. I began to feel weaker. I was determined to remember this, but I knew that I would not if I did not record it somehow, so against what my body was telling me (lie down on the floor now or DIE!) I staggered over to where we kept some pens and sticky-notes and grabbed one of each, and in barely legible shaky handwriting I quickly wrote “It’s all made up of little parts” and underlined it, put it down, and collapsed. It was the best I could do, but it turned out to be sufficient to the purpose, because later on upon reading it, it all came back to me. I managed to write it, but I sensed that I was risking my life in doing so, because it was incredibly difficult to force myself even to stand up and it felt like I was fairly close to death, and yet I forced myself and kept forcing myself until I’d finished writing that note to myself. It seemed at the time far too important an experience to forget.
***
-Physical Death Preview
I was doing a meditation in which I was very deep inside my own mind, but I do not recall the nature of this meditation, just that I was apparently fiddling around with something that I shouldn’t have. I remember that I got to a certain point where I had the option to do a certain thing, whatever that was, and I started to do it, when I felt the scariest sensation of my whole life. I felt my body start to die. Now, I’m not saying that it actually was, but I was definitely feeling it as if it was. I felt tiny bits of consciousness all over and through my body, indeed apparently composing my body, start to just *wink out* like snuffed candles.
My own kinesthetic body sense seemed composed of small areas of sensory feedback, all combined to make me. Millions of them. Well, what I was feeling was those tiny centers of consciousness that make up my gestalt consciousness, disappearing. Poof!
They were my body sense, but also my mind itself. I felt small parts of it shutting off, literally going away, like bubbles in a full tub popping and slowly disappearing one by one, and if I let it continue I’d be gone altogether soon enough.
It’s hard to capture in words how this felt. How would you feel if you look down at your body and pieces of it started to go numb and fall off? This was pretty similar, and very scary indeed. Parts of me were simply shutting down. This seemed to me to be just about the worst case scenario for whatever one feels as they’re actually dying, the terror of just seeing it all go away, the terror of feeling parts of your mind simply ceasing to exist, and you along with it.
Of course as soon as I ceased whatever the hell I was doing, it just stopped. That one, I didn’t bother trying again just to be sure.
***
-The Sword
Sitting in trance in a straight-backed chair, eyes open, staring upwards at an angle. I had been meditating for a few minutes, and I was in an intermediate-deep state. I saw hints of motion above and in front of me for a few seconds and I wondered what would appear, but that’s all I had time for when a brightly glowing arc-shaped line of energy that resembled nothing less than a very large curved sword swiftly descended point-first from the upper left (my left) side near the vicinity of the ceiling and stabbed completely through my body on my left side just below my ribcage, exiting out the back and going into the chair. It was instant excruciating pain! I felt it stab completely through my body, seeming to exit just above my left kidney area, pinning me to the chair. I clearly felt the blade inside of me, and the pain followed its path all the way through my side from the skin on the front of my body to the skin on the back. AHHH! That really, really hurt.
I sat there, pinned, and did some breathing exercises and gradually both the sword and the pain faded away, but I came away from the experience thinking that it seemed as if one of my other versions, a doppelganger in some other plane of existence far removed from mine, was just killed by a sword, or at least gravely wounded, and I felt it all happen somehow.
***
-I Lose One Of Me
Meditating lying down, ample light in the room, in trance. Suddenly and with no warning I see and feel a glowing “ghost” of myself, perfect in every detail but translucent and glowing a dim greenish light, exit my body to the left, as if I’d been lying there with two “me’s” perfectly superimposed in one body and one of them just decided to leave.
I felt this “other me” roll out of my body to the left side into the solid wall there, as one might roll off a bed. Inside of my body it felt like half my atoms all left at the same time. I felt a real body, as it seemed, a duplicate of me, leave me.
I felt diminished, “halved” even, and thought “I’ve heard of astral projection, but usually you’re the one projecting out of your body, not the one left behind!
Perhaps it was a rare instance of me being conscious of a splitting point where my universe divided in two, and one of me “went thataway…”
***
-The 90 Degree Turn
This is truly one of the most amazing and startling things that has ever happened to me on salvia.
I am sitting cross-legged on the bed, in a moderate trance, facing the closet at the end of the bedroom.
I am meditating on the point between my eyes.
Suddenly, I rotated ninety degrees to the right. Not my body, no. That remained perfectly still. My consciousness inside of my body rotated smoothly to the right while still inside of my body, and then my face seemed to part the skin of the right side of my head near my ear. I felt something like an elastic membrane parting for me, and then I saw another identical room there with the closet in front of me just like the first one! I could still see the old room, situated at 90 degrees to the new one! I was in between two identical rooms in two (nearly?) identical universes; that was the only explanation. So I popped out of my “old body’s” side completely, leaving the old room behind forever, and now there I sat, still in the identical position, having not moved at all physically, still facing the closet; but I knew that it was not the same closet in the same room, because I had seen the old one and the new one at 90 degree angles to each other before I allowed myself to completely “come into” this new one.
So there I sat, still cross-legged on my bed and facing that closet, totally stunned by what had just happened to me. I had not moved, had not twitched a finger, but my consciousness had rotated to the right and moved into a new cross-legged version of me in a new version of my bedroom. WOW.
***
-The Broken Room
Sitting meditation, cross-legged on the bed, eyes closed. I had just had a somewhat ‘bad trip’ wherein I was stretched into a long elastic sheet and fed into what seemed like a pulley, knowing that when I got to the pulley thing I would “pop” and be destroyed, sensing somehow that this has happened to me many times before. Visions like that are fairly common; being destroyed, atomized, ground up to powder, rolled over by a huge wheel, that sort of thing. Other salvianauts commonly have them too.
Then on coming out of it, I sat there on the bed and opened my eyes. The room was very still and quiet. Then I felt and heard slight tremors and vibrations. Suddenly the room started to literally fracture all over; the walls cracked, and the entire room twisted as if in the hands of a giant. Through the cracks and fissures, clouds of purest blackness started to seep in, what I call “the Outer Darkness,” like clouds of perfectly black ink seeping into a room filled with clear water. I could clearly hear the room fracturing and twisting. This displeased me, so I willed it all to slow down and stop. Then there I was, sitting there, fully aware, eyes open, looking around the room. The cracks were still there, but were no longer progressing, and the clouds of Outer Darkness were still there frozen in time as it were. I looked to my right where my wife was sleeping. A crack had appeared in the wall behind us, between me and her. A cloud of Outer Darkness hung frozen out of that crack, totally obscuring my wife’s face and head from me. Other, large cracks were all over the walls and ceiling, all with pure blackness frozen in the act of seeping through them. The room itself wasn’t even a regular rectangular room shape anymore; it was twisted out of line.
This was not my first encounter with the Outer Darkness. The first time, in meditation, I saw “flames” of it seeping through a shadow on my wall, and watched them flicker for quite a while; the second time was similar but I willed them to come to me and actually spent some time playing with them in my hand, little black flames flickering and dancing on and among my fingers. My wife came into the room at that time, and I asked her “You don’t see these, do you?” nodding toward my open hand. She of course didn’t see anything, but to my eyes they were still there, practically frolicking on my hand. I've never felt more like a sorcerer in my life.
On a couple of other occasions I’d also seen them seeping through small cracks in the room, but never like this Broken Room experience.
Incidentally, I’ve read of shamans speaking of the “outer darkness” or “outer blackness” and beings who dwell there, so that’s why I labeled it that in my head.
***
-A Woman’s Voice
Sitting meditation in a straight-back chair, medium-deep trance, eyes closed. I was visualizing all of creation as a vast cloud of consciousness with the external parts, the outer surfaces if you will, being where we are to be found, as if we lived in just the ‘crust’ of all reality. I then felt a presence, and clearly heard a woman’s voice say something like “yes, this is how it is.” I felt that she was a real being, not my imagination, perhaps even a personification of the ALL. So I thought a bit about what I wanted to say next. I then asked her, “What then of the World’s Pain?” and imagined all the pain and suffering and heartache and death and destruction and terror of this world as I asked it. She replied in the saddest, most resigned tone imaginable “It is unavoidable. It is how it is. Such a pity. Such a shame.”
That’s it. Still, very eerie, let me assure you.
***
-DEMON
I’ve felt like I was dying in several ways, felt my consciousness fade away, been ground to powder, stretched like a rubber sheet and met a Demiurge-like being that was very scary in a satanic kind of way a couple of times, but nothing compares to this for sheer terror.
My Worst Experience on Salvia Ever:
I am standing in my room after a trip, looking at a large quartz crystal that I had on my dresser. It’s a very rare and unusual specimen that I bought on a business trip to Minas Gerais, Brazil. (I am a gemologist by trade)
It was a “phantom” crystal about five inches tall, clear, but with a milky-white lamellar phantom in it. This is another quartz crystal embedded in the larger one, and it was separated into flat planes so it looked like a layer cake. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen or even heard of, and a minerologist that I showed it to was mystified by it as well, as was my local mineral-collector's club.
So I’m staring into it, and something made me have a very, very bad thought. I will not tell you what that thought was, but it was completely unlike me to ever think such a thing. Let’s just say that it was incredibly evil, and involved homicide. The worst thought that I could think of, basically. Awful, disgusting, sick. Not like me at all; I never think such things.
I’m still staring at the crystal as I’m having this thought, and as soon as I had it I thrust it away from me in disgust. That’s when it got really strange. The thought just got stronger! I was starting to literally panic as I tried again and again to rid myself of the thought, but all of my panic simply fed the thought, and it grew and grew. My fear fed it. My attempts to not think it, fed it. I thought to myself “What if I actually did that horrible thing” and that really fed it! Every single thing that I could think of to get rid of it, fed it. Stronger and stronger it became, and as it did, the air in front of the crystal started to take on a strange, pixelated look, then geometric shapes started to form there, odd moving geometry that I could somehow sense was literally causing my mind to start fracturing and breaking like glass. I was going mad! This vicious cycle of thought was shattering my mind! In stark terror now, I could see that it was getting the better of me, and if it won, I’d be stark-raving mad, and even possibly commit acts of disgusting violence, so I really “clamped down” on it and forced myself to *forget the whole thing* by physically moving my body around and turning my head away from the crystal, and other self-distracting physical actions, all the while willing myself to another line of thought. That finally worked, but it was a battle. Phew!
Ever since then, I’ve understood psychosis intuitively. I get it now. It’s a feedback cycle, fed by every attempt to rid yourself from it. I “get” madness now. I really do. The mind is capable of getting involved in a negative feedback cycle from which no apparent exit is possible, and all attempts at breaking it only feed it.
I was utterly terrified the whole time. I’ve even gone so far as to “install” safeguards in my mind against such a thing ever happening to me again. I’m confident that it won’t.
***
-The Potential Ghost
This occurred shortly after the Demon experience outlined above, so I was prepared for mental feedback cycles.
After a salvia meditation in my bedroom I walked out to the kitchen to get a drink. Afterwards as I was walking back to the bedroom, I paused and looked down the hallway. It was very dark in that hallway, and the fact that I’d just done salvia made it look even darker, with more suspicious shadows. It just looked creepy.
So I had a thought that I would try a ‘belief experiment.” Staring down the hall, I (intentionally) thought of how creepy it was, focused on that, and thought that perhaps I could even see movement in that hallway. I was thinking that perhaps seeing ghosts was also a feedback cycle of apprehension or fear, at least sometime, and I wanted to try it. So there I was, looking down the hallway, when I clearly saw a swirl of movement. I allowed myself to feel the “creepy factor,” allowed myself to feel apprehension. Maybe a ghost would appear, maybe I’d see something really scary or gross, maybe maybemaybe… now I was feeling a slight level of actual fear, but only because that was my goal, to feel exactly that.
The swirling started to solidify into a form. A moving form. A human form.
So that’s where I called it, when I ended the experiment. I shut down the feedback cycle in my mind forcibly, the figure disappeared, and I walked down the creepy hallway to the end, now confident that there was nothing to fear. And there wasn’t. So I went back to my room and fell asleep.
I’m fairly confident now that many psychoses, and the hallucinations of the schizophrenic, are in reality just such mental feedback cycles.
***
-Sitting Up While Lying Down
I often meditate sitting up in a straight-backed chair near my bed. So there I was one night, meditating on salvia after tripping out, in a relaxation phase afterwards. I was sitting there upright, my eyes closed, slowly coming back to being myself. After a few minutes of this, I opened my eyes to an astonishing sight: Tonight I was not sitting down in my chair, that’s not what I had done. I was lying down flat on my back in bed. However, I felt myself in an upright, sitting position as if in my chair. My actual body was flat, my legs stretched out in front of me on the bed, but that’s not where I felt them. I felt my legs down beneath me, my feet on the floor. But there’s a bed underneath me! My legs were out of my body, as it were, and were interpenetrating the bed. I’d simply forgotten that I’d gone to bed before this meditation and misremembered it as a sitting one. So there I was, feeling myself in an upright sitting position while actually lying on my back, and I even had some time, a few minutes perhaps, to contemplate this weirdness. Slowly as I tried to sense my actual legs and not my “astral” ones, the latter faded away and my senses returned to normal; now the legs that I saw were at least the legs that I felt!
***
-Pure Gnosis; the Highest Ascent
This was an unusual meditation as I was using certain OTO (OrdoTemploOrientis) energy raising techniques to achieve a very high state of gnosis. It worked.
Eyes closed, deep trance, but aware and cogent.
In the meditation I built my energy up to a peak and released it, launching my consciousness straight upwards.
Suddenly I was flying up and up, through many, many layers that felt almost like I was traveling up through geological strata or something similar. Upwards and upwards my consciousness flew, faster and faster, until I felt myself break through a final layer, a final barrier, and my head and shoulders apparently broke through the floor of a room somewhere. It was as if the floor of the room, while normally solid, was like water to me, and I splashed right through it, just as if I had been on the bottom of a deep swimming pool and had kicked off and then broke forcibly through the surface of the water into the air. I only had perhaps a half-second to see the room, and then I fell back into the “water” of the floor and sunk back down to my body resting in my bedroom, but what I saw in that room bears mentioning: It was a long room, seemingly of modern decor, minimalistic, with an opening at the far end onto a small courtyard perhaps. The courtyard was in full sunlight but the room was somewhat dark by comparison, albeit still easy enough to see in. There was a woman standing about five feet in front of me to my left, one or possibly two other people in the room farther away, and at the farthest part of the room away from me where it opened into the bright courtyard, a man was standing.
It was just as if they were there going about their business, perhaps socializing, in that room, when suddenly I broke up through the floor and interrupted them. They all turned to face me very quickly, as if very startled. The man near the courtyard turned, the woman near me turned, the one or possibly two other figures turned, all seemingly very startled as if in shock to see me there. I got a sense then, from them; a feeling, an intuition, that they were all thinking “this should never happen!” It wasn't like they didn't know what was happening, either. It was as if they knew exactly what was happening and what I was, and they didn't like it.
***
So that’s the end of my little baker's dozen of miscellaneous weird salvia accounts. Hope you enjoyed them.
A Few New Meditations (and one trip report that was different)
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
A FEW NEW MEDITATIONS and one trip report that was different...
First, last night, meditating as usual, sitting upright in a chair this time.
I find myself seemingly pressed up against a flat surface. No, wait, I seem to be a part of that flat surface, seem to be involved with it somehow. No, more like my face is pressed up against it, but somehow at the same time I can see it like it's several feet away. It’s not like a membrane this time. (Not the first time I’ve encountered such flat surfaces)
This time it is like a wall. And the wall has a pattern to it. It seems to consist of hexagonal cells, not unlike a honeycomb. My first thought was “chicken wire!”
The wall itself seemed a neutral color, maybe a beige-ish, but the pattern had a glassy whitish-clear sheen to it. It was shining. Not so much glowing, as shining. It was extraordinarily regular and showed no deformed hexagons. It was as regular as if made by a machine, and by that I mean nothing except as a comment as to its extreme symmetry. I could see the diagonal lines intersecting at 60 degrees that were formed by the coincidence of their edges, and they were very straight lines.
So that was interesting. Since I’d never seen it before, something in the back of my mind alerted me that it was a new phenomenon, and I pulled myself out of salvia space by repeating the words “chicken wire” out loud, over and over, so as to keep the memory of it with me.
Second, a few new meditations!
NEW MEDITATIONS
The Candy Bar
(This sounds rather silly, if I may say so myself, but it's worth doing)
Sit as usual, calm the mind, and eat a bite of your favorite candy bar or favorite food, preferably I think with nuts, as protein seems to be part of this. It needs to be something that you really find delicious.
Continue eating. Finish it.
As you do this, concentrate on the sensation of tasting it. Of eating it. Of all of your bodily sensations as you chew it and swallow it, piece by piece.
When I did this last night, just thinking to have a snack right after a trip and then turning it into a meditation, I could see a distinct reddish glow starting in my mouth as I tasted it and spreading rapidly (and concentrically, oddly enough) throughout my body, and I felt that glow as well. It was almost like a head rush, but more of a “body rush,” I think.
I could see it spread throughout the black sparkling void that is my body as a reddish glow, and I could feel that glow tingling as it spread.
It was like you could feel pure energy being absorbed into the body, and not the mere taste and absorption of food.
Head Sense
This is pretty basic, but it is fun in the sense that it reminds you that you even have a body, while you’re in salvia space.
In meditation with salvia, lower your head and hold it in your hands. Explore your scalp and all around your head, front to back with your hands, especially the back. Now, sense your mind inside of the head that you are holding. Note how your mind, your brain, exists only between your hands, but your hands seem to partake of that consciousness; indeed seem to be equally conscious.
This, and the next meditation are very interesting meditations in that they force you to consider your physical body while in a state where it is very difficult to do so. I also get a real visual sense of my hands touching my head, which is interesting when you consider that I'm seeing them as reddish-black umbras, even at the back of my head. It's a novel thing to seem to be seeing out of the back of your head.
Self-Embrace
Similar to the above, but this time more like ‘body sense.’
Sitting in meditation, fold your arms across your chest, hands underneath. Grasp your own body at the sides of your chest with thumbs on chest. Feel the sensation of holding your own body as if from outside. Alternately you can hold your own body at the sides with thumbs in.
Like the above, this gets interesting, in that while you can feel your head, or your body,
it doesn’t feel like that body is the physical limit of your mind, or at least not to me. You almost need your hands to even tell where your body actually is.
A FEW NEW MEDITATIONS and one trip report that was different...
First, last night, meditating as usual, sitting upright in a chair this time.
I find myself seemingly pressed up against a flat surface. No, wait, I seem to be a part of that flat surface, seem to be involved with it somehow. No, more like my face is pressed up against it, but somehow at the same time I can see it like it's several feet away. It’s not like a membrane this time. (Not the first time I’ve encountered such flat surfaces)
This time it is like a wall. And the wall has a pattern to it. It seems to consist of hexagonal cells, not unlike a honeycomb. My first thought was “chicken wire!”
The wall itself seemed a neutral color, maybe a beige-ish, but the pattern had a glassy whitish-clear sheen to it. It was shining. Not so much glowing, as shining. It was extraordinarily regular and showed no deformed hexagons. It was as regular as if made by a machine, and by that I mean nothing except as a comment as to its extreme symmetry. I could see the diagonal lines intersecting at 60 degrees that were formed by the coincidence of their edges, and they were very straight lines.
So that was interesting. Since I’d never seen it before, something in the back of my mind alerted me that it was a new phenomenon, and I pulled myself out of salvia space by repeating the words “chicken wire” out loud, over and over, so as to keep the memory of it with me.
Second, a few new meditations!
NEW MEDITATIONS
The Candy Bar
(This sounds rather silly, if I may say so myself, but it's worth doing)
Sit as usual, calm the mind, and eat a bite of your favorite candy bar or favorite food, preferably I think with nuts, as protein seems to be part of this. It needs to be something that you really find delicious.
Continue eating. Finish it.
As you do this, concentrate on the sensation of tasting it. Of eating it. Of all of your bodily sensations as you chew it and swallow it, piece by piece.
When I did this last night, just thinking to have a snack right after a trip and then turning it into a meditation, I could see a distinct reddish glow starting in my mouth as I tasted it and spreading rapidly (and concentrically, oddly enough) throughout my body, and I felt that glow as well. It was almost like a head rush, but more of a “body rush,” I think.
I could see it spread throughout the black sparkling void that is my body as a reddish glow, and I could feel that glow tingling as it spread.
It was like you could feel pure energy being absorbed into the body, and not the mere taste and absorption of food.
Head Sense
This is pretty basic, but it is fun in the sense that it reminds you that you even have a body, while you’re in salvia space.
In meditation with salvia, lower your head and hold it in your hands. Explore your scalp and all around your head, front to back with your hands, especially the back. Now, sense your mind inside of the head that you are holding. Note how your mind, your brain, exists only between your hands, but your hands seem to partake of that consciousness; indeed seem to be equally conscious.
This, and the next meditation are very interesting meditations in that they force you to consider your physical body while in a state where it is very difficult to do so. I also get a real visual sense of my hands touching my head, which is interesting when you consider that I'm seeing them as reddish-black umbras, even at the back of my head. It's a novel thing to seem to be seeing out of the back of your head.
Self-Embrace
Similar to the above, but this time more like ‘body sense.’
Sitting in meditation, fold your arms across your chest, hands underneath. Grasp your own body at the sides of your chest with thumbs on chest. Feel the sensation of holding your own body as if from outside. Alternately you can hold your own body at the sides with thumbs in.
Like the above, this gets interesting, in that while you can feel your head, or your body,
it doesn’t feel like that body is the physical limit of your mind, or at least not to me. You almost need your hands to even tell where your body actually is.
Profoundly Deep State
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Profoundly Deep State
Night before last, sitting on bed meditating, 100X.
I reach a very deep state of meditation, deeper than any before. I feel like a field, like a mist; my body is nowhere to be found. I have no body. I am this vibrating field of energy, hovering above my bed.
This state remains unchanged for over an hour. I didn't even feel the time pass. How I remained in this state for so long when inhaled salvia smoke only produces an effect that lasts about twenty minutes is beyond me. It was a state of bliss. I remember wishing that it was my natural state, that I felt like that all the time.
My mind is diffused; I can still think but it feels like my whole being is thinking rather than just my mind, or that my mind is my whole being.
My thoughts are foreign. The way in which my mind is thinking is foreign to me. I am not thinking like a human. It's far more complex. More involved. And I seem to have all the time I need in this state. More time than ever before.
I feel at home in this state, as if it were just as natural as my normal waking mind, perhaps more natural even.
My mind seems to be integrated with the room around me. As if I am using my surroundings as part of my mind. As if the room is thinking with me.
I feel a sense of control, a sense of sureness, of certainty, of confidence.
My wife is sleeping peacefully next to me. I have not moved a finger in an hour. My body is so still that I forget it exists.
I think of her, sleeping there two feet away. I decide, I make a decision.
I send a wave, a ripple, a warp in reality, at the recumbent form of my wife, to awaken her. Why not?
I see it, a fold in space, whip out from me, from my whole body, and impact upon my sleeping wife.
She immediately starts awake, as I absolutely knew that she would. Fully awake. We talk. She has no idea what woke her up.
I seem to be gaining more control. Question is, over what exactly?
What does this mean? There is a mystery here, and I have no idea how to solve it. I am accomplishing something that is considered absolutely impossible in this world by almost everybody, and I am doing it with more and more regularity. It's becoming routine.
And yet, what is going on? How is it accomplished?
In a universe of matter and energy and space and time, this is not possible. It cannot happen in that kind of place.
Thought can have no control over inert matter. No effect. In such a material reality, my thoughts or visions have no way in which to affect the thoughts of another person, no way to create the necessary physical or energetical changes in dendrite firing or axon transmission. In a purely physical reality, this cannot be.
So this is not that kind of universe.
More and more it becomes apparent and obvious that this place is a dream, or more accurately a communal dreamlike state.
How else can this be happening? How else could this work?
I am not certain of course, but I don't think that there is another way, another possibility.
How else could this happen?
Additional Information:
(added same day, December 21st)
I thought of some additional details to this experience that I thought might be important.
During the meditation I had my eyes closed at first and then open well before I decided to awaken my wife. At that point the room was clearly visible, but everything was unreal, like a dream, not like regular reality. I knew that it was reality, but it had the qualities of a dream. Everything was composed of shimmering energy. I felt in control as if it were a lucid dream in which I had mastered the experience. It frankly felt unreal, but real at the same time.
When your eyes are closed you seem to see a space in your head; consider this inner space your "Inner Viewscreen" if you will, on which you imagine things, on (or in) which you normally visualize things in your regular day-to-day life.
During the latter part of this experience I felt that everything, both what was inside my head in that inner space and what I had heretofore considered outside of my head which I normally perceived only with my senses, were both equally inside of my head, both on that "Inner Viewscreen" of the imagination, melded together seamlessly somehow, with little demarcation between them. Both seemed equally imaginary, so much so that in fact I was for a short while somewhat bothered by the fact that I had actually awakened my wife as I had planned, because it seemed to prove her, and everything else for that matter, to be all just figments of my imagination, in the worst solipsistic sense possible.
However, as Monty Python said, "I got better!"
Profoundly Deep State
Night before last, sitting on bed meditating, 100X.
I reach a very deep state of meditation, deeper than any before. I feel like a field, like a mist; my body is nowhere to be found. I have no body. I am this vibrating field of energy, hovering above my bed.
This state remains unchanged for over an hour. I didn't even feel the time pass. How I remained in this state for so long when inhaled salvia smoke only produces an effect that lasts about twenty minutes is beyond me. It was a state of bliss. I remember wishing that it was my natural state, that I felt like that all the time.
My mind is diffused; I can still think but it feels like my whole being is thinking rather than just my mind, or that my mind is my whole being.
My thoughts are foreign. The way in which my mind is thinking is foreign to me. I am not thinking like a human. It's far more complex. More involved. And I seem to have all the time I need in this state. More time than ever before.
I feel at home in this state, as if it were just as natural as my normal waking mind, perhaps more natural even.
My mind seems to be integrated with the room around me. As if I am using my surroundings as part of my mind. As if the room is thinking with me.
I feel a sense of control, a sense of sureness, of certainty, of confidence.
My wife is sleeping peacefully next to me. I have not moved a finger in an hour. My body is so still that I forget it exists.
I think of her, sleeping there two feet away. I decide, I make a decision.
I send a wave, a ripple, a warp in reality, at the recumbent form of my wife, to awaken her. Why not?
I see it, a fold in space, whip out from me, from my whole body, and impact upon my sleeping wife.
She immediately starts awake, as I absolutely knew that she would. Fully awake. We talk. She has no idea what woke her up.
I seem to be gaining more control. Question is, over what exactly?
What does this mean? There is a mystery here, and I have no idea how to solve it. I am accomplishing something that is considered absolutely impossible in this world by almost everybody, and I am doing it with more and more regularity. It's becoming routine.
And yet, what is going on? How is it accomplished?
In a universe of matter and energy and space and time, this is not possible. It cannot happen in that kind of place.
Thought can have no control over inert matter. No effect. In such a material reality, my thoughts or visions have no way in which to affect the thoughts of another person, no way to create the necessary physical or energetical changes in dendrite firing or axon transmission. In a purely physical reality, this cannot be.
So this is not that kind of universe.
More and more it becomes apparent and obvious that this place is a dream, or more accurately a communal dreamlike state.
How else can this be happening? How else could this work?
I am not certain of course, but I don't think that there is another way, another possibility.
How else could this happen?
Additional Information:
(added same day, December 21st)
I thought of some additional details to this experience that I thought might be important.
During the meditation I had my eyes closed at first and then open well before I decided to awaken my wife. At that point the room was clearly visible, but everything was unreal, like a dream, not like regular reality. I knew that it was reality, but it had the qualities of a dream. Everything was composed of shimmering energy. I felt in control as if it were a lucid dream in which I had mastered the experience. It frankly felt unreal, but real at the same time.
When your eyes are closed you seem to see a space in your head; consider this inner space your "Inner Viewscreen" if you will, on which you imagine things, on (or in) which you normally visualize things in your regular day-to-day life.
During the latter part of this experience I felt that everything, both what was inside my head in that inner space and what I had heretofore considered outside of my head which I normally perceived only with my senses, were both equally inside of my head, both on that "Inner Viewscreen" of the imagination, melded together seamlessly somehow, with little demarcation between them. Both seemed equally imaginary, so much so that in fact I was for a short while somewhat bothered by the fact that I had actually awakened my wife as I had planned, because it seemed to prove her, and everything else for that matter, to be all just figments of my imagination, in the worst solipsistic sense possible.
However, as Monty Python said, "I got better!"
The Universe of Partial Being
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
The Universe of Partial Being
Several nights ago, 100X, meditating while lying on the bed. I was intentionally shielding, or more properly enclosing myself, erecting imaginary barriers so as to not disturb others asleep nearby with my meditation. I'd been working on this because as you know if you've been keeping up with my adventures, it happens a lot.
I had an unusual meditation wherein I was lying there flipping through universes. I wasn’t even that conscious of it at the time, but I was flickering from one plane of existence to another, just for the fun of it. It seemed natural. Like changing channels when you’re bored.
The thing that made me realize that that was what I was doing is when I suddenly found myself in a universe or parallel plane that seemed to be one in which the very force of being was diminished, in which the very force of my own personal being was diminished.
Suddenly there I was, still lying down as I was in all the others (and in my original one) but everything was lessened somehow. The pattern was still there, still accurate, my room was the same, my body was the same, but the “realness” of everything was greatly decreased, including my own.
It was rather disturbing, to be lying there and feeling starved for life force, for lack of a better term. I was craving more existence. It wasn’t just me, either. I felt that everything in that place was less real, and not in the sense of feeling unreal like a dream might feel unreal. No, less real as if “realness” were a measurable quality and I was used to living at 100 percent and suddenly found myself at 50 or 60 in an almost completely indescribable state of partial being.
I was half a ghost.
It was similar to the idea of being short on air, gasping for breath, but my mind was gasping for more reality instead. My body and mind was craving it like oxygen. There just wasn’t enough of it there to satisfy.
It felt like a complete parallel world like all the other ones that I “visit” regularly in my journeys with all the details of this one, but a shadow of itself, a shadow world in which I was in a state of being a shadow of myself, still myself but much noticeably less so.
I got the strong impression that these partial worlds exist, that such shadow universes are out there, and that I had happened upon one.
I also felt that feeling of familiarity; I’ve visited a place like this before. How strange.
Once I’d had enough, I shifted out of it in the same manner that I had shifted into it, and was back in a place that could support my being in the manner to which it was accustomed. Phew!
It was a very strong experience, quite frightening actually, and one that I think has something to teach me.
I only wish I knew what it was. Can it be that such places exist out there somewhere in the infinite web of multiple parallel psychological realities?
Very strange place that I don’t really care to visit again.
The Universe of Partial Being
Several nights ago, 100X, meditating while lying on the bed. I was intentionally shielding, or more properly enclosing myself, erecting imaginary barriers so as to not disturb others asleep nearby with my meditation. I'd been working on this because as you know if you've been keeping up with my adventures, it happens a lot.
I had an unusual meditation wherein I was lying there flipping through universes. I wasn’t even that conscious of it at the time, but I was flickering from one plane of existence to another, just for the fun of it. It seemed natural. Like changing channels when you’re bored.
The thing that made me realize that that was what I was doing is when I suddenly found myself in a universe or parallel plane that seemed to be one in which the very force of being was diminished, in which the very force of my own personal being was diminished.
Suddenly there I was, still lying down as I was in all the others (and in my original one) but everything was lessened somehow. The pattern was still there, still accurate, my room was the same, my body was the same, but the “realness” of everything was greatly decreased, including my own.
It was rather disturbing, to be lying there and feeling starved for life force, for lack of a better term. I was craving more existence. It wasn’t just me, either. I felt that everything in that place was less real, and not in the sense of feeling unreal like a dream might feel unreal. No, less real as if “realness” were a measurable quality and I was used to living at 100 percent and suddenly found myself at 50 or 60 in an almost completely indescribable state of partial being.
I was half a ghost.
It was similar to the idea of being short on air, gasping for breath, but my mind was gasping for more reality instead. My body and mind was craving it like oxygen. There just wasn’t enough of it there to satisfy.
It felt like a complete parallel world like all the other ones that I “visit” regularly in my journeys with all the details of this one, but a shadow of itself, a shadow world in which I was in a state of being a shadow of myself, still myself but much noticeably less so.
I got the strong impression that these partial worlds exist, that such shadow universes are out there, and that I had happened upon one.
I also felt that feeling of familiarity; I’ve visited a place like this before. How strange.
Once I’d had enough, I shifted out of it in the same manner that I had shifted into it, and was back in a place that could support my being in the manner to which it was accustomed. Phew!
It was a very strong experience, quite frightening actually, and one that I think has something to teach me.
I only wish I knew what it was. Can it be that such places exist out there somewhere in the infinite web of multiple parallel psychological realities?
Very strange place that I don’t really care to visit again.
Sphericality
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Sitting in meditation, late at night.
A shift in perception, a disorientation.
An infinite emptiness starred with spherical bubbles of reality. At the center of each bubble I sit in meditation, fully aware of the world around me. My sense of self is equally present in all of them. Equally present, "I" am in each one. Each bubble is a spherical distortion of the room around me with me in it, a spherical-lens effect in three dimensions.
(See spherical lens effect picture above for an idea of how each of these looked)(Now imagine many, many such spheres, perhaps an infinite number of them, scattered evenly through an empty space, a void, each an entire reality compressed by spherical distortion into a round bubble floating with a multitude of other such bubbles as if frozen in a perfectly clear glass of carbonated water, only all the same size and distributed evenly throughout the clear matrix)
I am present in each one. I sit at the center of each one. There I am. And there. And there too…
I am Legion. Or at any rate, I'm a crowd.
In each, the whole world is wrapped around me in compressed spherical distortion. In each, I sit. In each, I feel my weight pressing down on me as I usually do in this planet’s gravity well. Only I feel it many times over, all at once. I am equally "in" each sphere. My very sense of self, is in each sphere. No only multiple visual and sound impressions, but even multiple kinesthetic sensations of my own body weight. I am no longer in one room; I am in many, many rooms, all at the same time, with no way to even determine which, if any, was my original reality. They are all equally real to me.
Yes, I feel multiple sensations of my own weight pressing down against my bed, so complete is the effect. What I’m really feeling I think, is one sensation of my own body weight, as sensed through multiple minds all working in parallel somehow. There also seems to be some kind of "Overmind" that is outside of all of this, observing the whole.
This "Overmind" is somehow also me.
Wow.
Somehow I am in each bubble, but I am also outside of them all, looking at (and somehow also directly sensing) all of them from an external perspective. And somehow, for some reason, I find this important.
As I start to come out of it, the sensations dissolve into something even more bizarre: Fragments of me and the room around me scattered all around, as if the hologram were broken and each fragment holds an impression of the whole, this somehow still mixed with the multiple spheres effect. The room is like a Funhouse Hall of Mirrors, but they’re all fragments of mirrors, some distorting and some reflecting true images of fragments of me and the room around me.
So there’s that. This seemed to be a more “deep” version of the “tiles” effect where I see multiple tiles or panes as if in a window, with myself and the room around me showing in each pane. In this version I got a much clearer view of the room around me, as if seen from a floating viewpoint, while also seeing it from my usual viewpoint at the same time, only multiplied; and also it was much more sensually immersive.
I felt my own weight, but I felt it in many multiple “locations” in a void, all at once.
That was different.
SALVIA MEDITATIONS (Part Four)
Salvia Tricks and Useful Meditations (Part 4)
PART 4 (OF 4)
“Inner Light” (difficult)
Relax as usual. No particular posture is necessary, but inner stillness is.
Close your eyes and look for an “inner glow.” With salvia I tend to see an inner light of a blue-greenish tinge*. It even feels slightly ‘tingly.’
With eyes closed you will see many colors on salvia, but look for what appears to be a light inside of your head, an inner glow.
If you do not see it, attempt to visualize it.
With effort and time, it will appear. For me it's just like there's a green LED at the back of my head shining out through my eyes, or onto the backs of my eyelids when they're closed.
This can be difficult enough, but now it really gets challenging.
Attempt to manipulate that light. Attempt to intensify it. Attempt to move it about in your mind, to create shapes out of it.
Then with eyes open, attempt to touch real world objects with it.
Intensifying this inner light leads to better manipulation of inner visions.
This exercise can also lead to objective results, as it is with this light that I have on occasion awakened my wife or disturbed my dog or cat. It’s always present when something like that happens.
*Magicians and occultists refer to this as the “Astral Light”
“Salvia Walk”
This can get very interesting
Just after experiencing the major effects of the onset and progress of a salvia “trip,” while you are still feeling the strong after-effects, take a walk outside in the dark.
-Night Sky
Standing still, look up at the night sky. Simply observe the stars above, or the moon.
Reflect on how very far away these objects are, but also take note of how they are also very close indeed, because these too exist completely in the mind. With practice you can sense them not ‘out there,’ but ‘in here.’
-Listening
While walking, focus on your sense of hearing. Pause in your walk from time to time as you hear an interesting sound. A cricket in the nearby grass, for example. With concentration, your sense of hearing intensifies greatly. It’s a matter of focus. A cricket fifty feet away can suddenly sound like you’re right next to it. As you walk you might even pick up on the sounds and conversations going on in nearby houses, even if their windows are closed. This exercise made me realize how a blind person must hear, with all their focus on that one sense. It is surprisingly intense.
-Kinesthesia
While walking, focus on the rhythm of your footsteps, the feel of your body in motion, the breeze on your skin, your balance... Again, with sufficient concentration and focus these things become magnified, are greatly intensified. You begin to feel more in control of your body, more one with it.
-Driving the Giant Robot
A phenomenon that I often notice when on a salvia walk is what I like to call ‘driving the giant robot.’
If you imagine your field-of-view as a large window in your head that you look out of, in normal mind your face is pressed right up against the glass of that window, figuratively speaking. On salvia it becomes possible to step back from that window. It feels like your consciousness is much smaller, as if you are a tiny consciousness, a small homunculus if you will, driving this huge, massive body-machine as it walks about, looking out through a large window that is several feet or even yards away rather than right up in front of you.
“Listening Exercises”
Explore the sense of hearing beyond what you’ve ever thought possible
While sitting in a comfortable position, concentrate on whatever background noises there might be. Simply listen. Clear the mind, and focus on listening. Do not allow yourself to become distracted. As in the previous exercise, with time and practice it can be amazing how intensely you can hear the tiniest sounds.
"Echolocation"
(This works best with some white noise in the background, perhaps a fan or air conditioner running)
As above, sit and listen. Now hold up your hand, eyes closed, and instead of trying to visualize it as in Phantom Sight, try to hear the sounds in the room as they bounce off your hand. It is surprisingly easy to hear the background noise of the room reflected off your hand. Practice this while moving the hand about slightly, holding up different numbers of fingers, and so on. The more you do this, the easier it gets. With practice you can hear the sonic pattern of your hand and even hear the subtle differences of when your hand is open, closed, or when you are holding up three fingers, or only one.
Another echolocation drill is to walk about in your home (slowly and carefully) with your eyes closed, occasionally making clicking sounds with your tongue. With practice you can sense walls and items of furniture solely from the reflected sound.
Incidentally, when you combine Phantom Sight with Echolocation you can even ‘see’ your hand more clearly due to the additional stimulus of reflected sound.
“Voices of Silence”
Explore the language centers of the mind
Again, relax, sit comfortably, and just listen. This is best in absolute silence, but if you do not have that luxury then running a small fan for background noise helps to limit distractions.
Concentrate on the silence. Focus on listening, on even the tiniest noises that you may hear. Then focus on the silence between the noises.
Just listen to the silence.
What you are listening for is a very subtle thing. It is not an easy thing to accomplish.
With sufficient practice and concentration on simply listening with a clear mind, you will eventually begin to hear very subtle voices. A gentle susurration of voices in the background. The more you focus on these tiny voices, the better you will hear them. Thousands of voices all speaking in neutral tones, as if you were in a concert hall with a thousand people in the seats, all talking in subdued voices.
All these voices are your voice. You are listening in on the language centers of your mind, a place in your mind where language is stored. All possible words and phrases (that you know) are being said in your mind at all times, over and over. With practice you can hear them. This is not a form of schizophrenia; all the voices are your voice.
-Hall of Phonemes, Hall of Sentence Fragments
Similar to the voices in the background, if you go deeply enough into yourself in this meditation you may find yourself in a dark room in your mind where all you hear are a multitude of voices, again all your voice, all just saying random sounds (phonemes) or sentence fragments in whispered tones. You are exploring the very nature of how we remember sounds, words, and parts of speech.
-Extra Credit
Now try to remember a favorite song. Listen to it in your head. With practice you may realize that your favorite song is always playing in a small, dedicated part of your consciousness, over and over again, with another small part of your consciousness always listening to it and making sure that you can access it when needed.
The same holds true with all sound memory, or so it seems.
“Peripheral Focus”
The opposite of “One-Point Mind”
This is the same meditation as One-Point Mind (both Inner and Outer at once, kind-of) only instead of focusing on one point, you focus on everything else but your usual point of focus. In other words, you focus on being de-focused, on your peripheral vision rather than your focal point or only on your peripheral awareness, or the periphery of the apparent inner "field-of-view" of your visual imagination if you are doing this with eyes closed. The goal is to sense the whole of your perception with equal focus. Try to get to the point where (eyes open) objects in your peripheral vision are clearly recognizable and aren't even that much less clear to you than objects right in front of you. You want to get to the point where you can just lose yourself in your surroundings. Eventually, when doing this eyes-open, you may come to realize that once again, all you are perceiving is not *out there,* but is instead in reality all *in here,* or rather, all of it is in your mind.
And eventually with eyes closed, you may come to realize that there is much in the periphery of your consciousness that you’ve never noticed before.
“Fill The Mind” (Very difficult but worth it)
A Western Ceremonial Magic style of meditation
In Eastern styles of meditation one is implored to “empty the mind” in order to achieve gnosis.* In Western styles one does the opposite. One fills the mind with imagery.
Hence, beginning with basics, close the eyes and visualize a familiar object. A pencil, a football, anything you like. It sometimes helps for the object to be something that evokes an emotional response, such as a ceremonial dagger perhaps, or a religious icon where appropriate. Another possibility is to use a large mirror and look at yourself. Stare yourself in the eye, and then study your entire body. Attempt to retain an three-dimensional image of the object or of yourself. Now, focus internally on that image. If an object, rotate it in your mind, see it from all angles, feel its texture, even sense its odor if it has one. You want to become practiced at building up a mental image with some complexity and consistency. If it’s an image of yourself, see yourself standing there in the darkness of your imagination, mentally walk around yourself, and see yourself from all angles.
This alone is good for a month of practice, or even more. I have found though, that salvia is a very effective shortcut here. It allows almost frightful levels of intense concentration.
The next step is to become able to visualize a pattern of complex behaviors.
The most well-known (and indeed, one of the best) of these is the “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram” but you can improvise whatever you like, even a martial arts kata or really, anything complex. Tai Chi would be very good also, I think.
The L.B.R.P.
(I’d read up on this a lot more before trying it; Wiki is just showing the basics)
(This is a more detailed description of the ceremony)
It would be a good idea to actually perform this ritual and practice it in the real world at least a few times before going further. Once you start to get the hang of it, start attempting to practice performing this complex ritual entirely in your mind, in your visual imagination, with no outward movement. This is the kind of thing that takes years to master, and I’m not here pretending that I have mastered it. However, even the failed attempts and the practice is interesting, and results can be quite satisfyingly vivid on salvia. (Salvia is again a huge shortcut here, saving literally years of meditation practice)
I should mention that the whole point of the LBRP is banishing, which means getting rid of bad energy such as illness or negative thought patterns.
Or demons.
(Which are really just negative thought patterns)
It is also used to ‘protect a space’ from undesired outside influence, if you believe in such things.
------------
*”Gnosis” is a state of one-ness with creation, usually thought of as one-ness with God. In magic, gnosis is the only mental state in which any magic performed will work. Thus the goal of all magical ritual is to achieve gnosis in order to perpetuate a change in reality. It is known that this state can be achieved by either emptying the mind utterly, or filling it to the overload point.
(The deepest secret of traditional Western magic is that in addition to traditional, meditative methods of achieving gnosis, there is also a moment of sure-fire gnosis at the point of sexual climax, so hey… do the math.)
“The Back Room Visualization”
Gives one more control while in the intensity of deep salvia space; allows one to better analyze one’s visions in the moment
You might want to practice this a few times while not tripping very deeply in order to retain the right amount of control when you are.
Imagine that your mind is this vast area where your visions are taking place, but you are not in that area; you are observing it from behind a window in a ‘back room’ in your mind. I visualize it as like a small “Mission Control” room with a huge window, but protected and separate from where your main visions are taking place in front of you. Like a private box at a sports arena perhaps. Nothing can get through that glass. No need to get too detailed on the furnishings and or accessories in the room itself; the main focus is on the fact that you have this protected space in the back of your mind to retreat to for protection from the chaos, and thus to be more capable of studying (and later recalling) what’s happening in your vision. Note that I say "back" room intentionally, as it seems to be located at the very back of your visualization area in your imagination, feeling like it is literally inside of and at the very back of your actual head.
When you trip more deeply it is possible to reflexively retreat to this ‘back room’ for safety and in order to better analyze what is happening. This technique is so effective it can also prevent you from losing consciousness while on a high dosage of extract.
Utilize the “Fists” technique in concert with this if you need to.
These techniques give you the ability to adjust your focus. However it is important to note that every situation calls for just the right amount of focus and not maximal or minimal focus. So part of the challenge here is to learn to focus just that right amount, pulling back when you feel the vision becoming less clear, and focusing in more when you feel it overwhelming you. (This may seem counter-intuitive until you realize that in a vision, the less you are able to focus, the more you see, and vice-versa)
******************************************
Other fun shit to do on salvia:
Physical activities can be very interesting on salvia, so I recommend such “Zen” activities as Yoga, Martial Arts Katas, Aikido drills such as eight-directions exercises, Tai-Chi, playing ping-pong, throwing darts, archery, even throwing playing cards into a waste basket. Salvia has the capability to intensify your ability to concentrate on your physical actions and it also is excellent for intensifying your perceptions and your self-perceptions. It can also improve reaction time and focus. It’s frankly an amazing substance.
PART 4 (OF 4)
“Inner Light” (difficult)
Relax as usual. No particular posture is necessary, but inner stillness is.
Close your eyes and look for an “inner glow.” With salvia I tend to see an inner light of a blue-greenish tinge*. It even feels slightly ‘tingly.’
With eyes closed you will see many colors on salvia, but look for what appears to be a light inside of your head, an inner glow.
If you do not see it, attempt to visualize it.
With effort and time, it will appear. For me it's just like there's a green LED at the back of my head shining out through my eyes, or onto the backs of my eyelids when they're closed.
This can be difficult enough, but now it really gets challenging.
Attempt to manipulate that light. Attempt to intensify it. Attempt to move it about in your mind, to create shapes out of it.
Then with eyes open, attempt to touch real world objects with it.
Intensifying this inner light leads to better manipulation of inner visions.
This exercise can also lead to objective results, as it is with this light that I have on occasion awakened my wife or disturbed my dog or cat. It’s always present when something like that happens.
*Magicians and occultists refer to this as the “Astral Light”
“Salvia Walk”
This can get very interesting
Just after experiencing the major effects of the onset and progress of a salvia “trip,” while you are still feeling the strong after-effects, take a walk outside in the dark.
-Night Sky
Standing still, look up at the night sky. Simply observe the stars above, or the moon.
Reflect on how very far away these objects are, but also take note of how they are also very close indeed, because these too exist completely in the mind. With practice you can sense them not ‘out there,’ but ‘in here.’
-Listening
While walking, focus on your sense of hearing. Pause in your walk from time to time as you hear an interesting sound. A cricket in the nearby grass, for example. With concentration, your sense of hearing intensifies greatly. It’s a matter of focus. A cricket fifty feet away can suddenly sound like you’re right next to it. As you walk you might even pick up on the sounds and conversations going on in nearby houses, even if their windows are closed. This exercise made me realize how a blind person must hear, with all their focus on that one sense. It is surprisingly intense.
-Kinesthesia
While walking, focus on the rhythm of your footsteps, the feel of your body in motion, the breeze on your skin, your balance... Again, with sufficient concentration and focus these things become magnified, are greatly intensified. You begin to feel more in control of your body, more one with it.
-Driving the Giant Robot
A phenomenon that I often notice when on a salvia walk is what I like to call ‘driving the giant robot.’
If you imagine your field-of-view as a large window in your head that you look out of, in normal mind your face is pressed right up against the glass of that window, figuratively speaking. On salvia it becomes possible to step back from that window. It feels like your consciousness is much smaller, as if you are a tiny consciousness, a small homunculus if you will, driving this huge, massive body-machine as it walks about, looking out through a large window that is several feet or even yards away rather than right up in front of you.
“Listening Exercises”
Explore the sense of hearing beyond what you’ve ever thought possible
While sitting in a comfortable position, concentrate on whatever background noises there might be. Simply listen. Clear the mind, and focus on listening. Do not allow yourself to become distracted. As in the previous exercise, with time and practice it can be amazing how intensely you can hear the tiniest sounds.
"Echolocation"
(This works best with some white noise in the background, perhaps a fan or air conditioner running)
As above, sit and listen. Now hold up your hand, eyes closed, and instead of trying to visualize it as in Phantom Sight, try to hear the sounds in the room as they bounce off your hand. It is surprisingly easy to hear the background noise of the room reflected off your hand. Practice this while moving the hand about slightly, holding up different numbers of fingers, and so on. The more you do this, the easier it gets. With practice you can hear the sonic pattern of your hand and even hear the subtle differences of when your hand is open, closed, or when you are holding up three fingers, or only one.
Another echolocation drill is to walk about in your home (slowly and carefully) with your eyes closed, occasionally making clicking sounds with your tongue. With practice you can sense walls and items of furniture solely from the reflected sound.
Incidentally, when you combine Phantom Sight with Echolocation you can even ‘see’ your hand more clearly due to the additional stimulus of reflected sound.
“Voices of Silence”
Explore the language centers of the mind
Again, relax, sit comfortably, and just listen. This is best in absolute silence, but if you do not have that luxury then running a small fan for background noise helps to limit distractions.
Concentrate on the silence. Focus on listening, on even the tiniest noises that you may hear. Then focus on the silence between the noises.
Just listen to the silence.
What you are listening for is a very subtle thing. It is not an easy thing to accomplish.
With sufficient practice and concentration on simply listening with a clear mind, you will eventually begin to hear very subtle voices. A gentle susurration of voices in the background. The more you focus on these tiny voices, the better you will hear them. Thousands of voices all speaking in neutral tones, as if you were in a concert hall with a thousand people in the seats, all talking in subdued voices.
All these voices are your voice. You are listening in on the language centers of your mind, a place in your mind where language is stored. All possible words and phrases (that you know) are being said in your mind at all times, over and over. With practice you can hear them. This is not a form of schizophrenia; all the voices are your voice.
-Hall of Phonemes, Hall of Sentence Fragments
Similar to the voices in the background, if you go deeply enough into yourself in this meditation you may find yourself in a dark room in your mind where all you hear are a multitude of voices, again all your voice, all just saying random sounds (phonemes) or sentence fragments in whispered tones. You are exploring the very nature of how we remember sounds, words, and parts of speech.
-Extra Credit
Now try to remember a favorite song. Listen to it in your head. With practice you may realize that your favorite song is always playing in a small, dedicated part of your consciousness, over and over again, with another small part of your consciousness always listening to it and making sure that you can access it when needed.
The same holds true with all sound memory, or so it seems.
“Peripheral Focus”
The opposite of “One-Point Mind”
This is the same meditation as One-Point Mind (both Inner and Outer at once, kind-of) only instead of focusing on one point, you focus on everything else but your usual point of focus. In other words, you focus on being de-focused, on your peripheral vision rather than your focal point or only on your peripheral awareness, or the periphery of the apparent inner "field-of-view" of your visual imagination if you are doing this with eyes closed. The goal is to sense the whole of your perception with equal focus. Try to get to the point where (eyes open) objects in your peripheral vision are clearly recognizable and aren't even that much less clear to you than objects right in front of you. You want to get to the point where you can just lose yourself in your surroundings. Eventually, when doing this eyes-open, you may come to realize that once again, all you are perceiving is not *out there,* but is instead in reality all *in here,* or rather, all of it is in your mind.
And eventually with eyes closed, you may come to realize that there is much in the periphery of your consciousness that you’ve never noticed before.
“Fill The Mind” (Very difficult but worth it)
A Western Ceremonial Magic style of meditation
In Eastern styles of meditation one is implored to “empty the mind” in order to achieve gnosis.* In Western styles one does the opposite. One fills the mind with imagery.
Hence, beginning with basics, close the eyes and visualize a familiar object. A pencil, a football, anything you like. It sometimes helps for the object to be something that evokes an emotional response, such as a ceremonial dagger perhaps, or a religious icon where appropriate. Another possibility is to use a large mirror and look at yourself. Stare yourself in the eye, and then study your entire body. Attempt to retain an three-dimensional image of the object or of yourself. Now, focus internally on that image. If an object, rotate it in your mind, see it from all angles, feel its texture, even sense its odor if it has one. You want to become practiced at building up a mental image with some complexity and consistency. If it’s an image of yourself, see yourself standing there in the darkness of your imagination, mentally walk around yourself, and see yourself from all angles.
This alone is good for a month of practice, or even more. I have found though, that salvia is a very effective shortcut here. It allows almost frightful levels of intense concentration.
The next step is to become able to visualize a pattern of complex behaviors.
The most well-known (and indeed, one of the best) of these is the “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram” but you can improvise whatever you like, even a martial arts kata or really, anything complex. Tai Chi would be very good also, I think.
The L.B.R.P.
(I’d read up on this a lot more before trying it; Wiki is just showing the basics)
(This is a more detailed description of the ceremony)
It would be a good idea to actually perform this ritual and practice it in the real world at least a few times before going further. Once you start to get the hang of it, start attempting to practice performing this complex ritual entirely in your mind, in your visual imagination, with no outward movement. This is the kind of thing that takes years to master, and I’m not here pretending that I have mastered it. However, even the failed attempts and the practice is interesting, and results can be quite satisfyingly vivid on salvia. (Salvia is again a huge shortcut here, saving literally years of meditation practice)
I should mention that the whole point of the LBRP is banishing, which means getting rid of bad energy such as illness or negative thought patterns.
Or demons.
(Which are really just negative thought patterns)
It is also used to ‘protect a space’ from undesired outside influence, if you believe in such things.
------------
*”Gnosis” is a state of one-ness with creation, usually thought of as one-ness with God. In magic, gnosis is the only mental state in which any magic performed will work. Thus the goal of all magical ritual is to achieve gnosis in order to perpetuate a change in reality. It is known that this state can be achieved by either emptying the mind utterly, or filling it to the overload point.
(The deepest secret of traditional Western magic is that in addition to traditional, meditative methods of achieving gnosis, there is also a moment of sure-fire gnosis at the point of sexual climax, so hey… do the math.)
“The Back Room Visualization”
Gives one more control while in the intensity of deep salvia space; allows one to better analyze one’s visions in the moment
You might want to practice this a few times while not tripping very deeply in order to retain the right amount of control when you are.
Imagine that your mind is this vast area where your visions are taking place, but you are not in that area; you are observing it from behind a window in a ‘back room’ in your mind. I visualize it as like a small “Mission Control” room with a huge window, but protected and separate from where your main visions are taking place in front of you. Like a private box at a sports arena perhaps. Nothing can get through that glass. No need to get too detailed on the furnishings and or accessories in the room itself; the main focus is on the fact that you have this protected space in the back of your mind to retreat to for protection from the chaos, and thus to be more capable of studying (and later recalling) what’s happening in your vision. Note that I say "back" room intentionally, as it seems to be located at the very back of your visualization area in your imagination, feeling like it is literally inside of and at the very back of your actual head.
When you trip more deeply it is possible to reflexively retreat to this ‘back room’ for safety and in order to better analyze what is happening. This technique is so effective it can also prevent you from losing consciousness while on a high dosage of extract.
Utilize the “Fists” technique in concert with this if you need to.
These techniques give you the ability to adjust your focus. However it is important to note that every situation calls for just the right amount of focus and not maximal or minimal focus. So part of the challenge here is to learn to focus just that right amount, pulling back when you feel the vision becoming less clear, and focusing in more when you feel it overwhelming you. (This may seem counter-intuitive until you realize that in a vision, the less you are able to focus, the more you see, and vice-versa)
******************************************
Other fun shit to do on salvia:
Physical activities can be very interesting on salvia, so I recommend such “Zen” activities as Yoga, Martial Arts Katas, Aikido drills such as eight-directions exercises, Tai-Chi, playing ping-pong, throwing darts, archery, even throwing playing cards into a waste basket. Salvia has the capability to intensify your ability to concentrate on your physical actions and it also is excellent for intensifying your perceptions and your self-perceptions. It can also improve reaction time and focus. It’s frankly an amazing substance.
SALVIA MEDITATIONS (Part Three)
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Salvia Tricks and Useful Meditations (Part 3)
PART 3 (OF 4)
"Inner Rocking"
Experience your “Energy Body”
Sit in a relaxed position, either cross-legged or in a straight chair (no armrests).
Close your eyes and concentrate on your mental image of your body, using the techniques explained in Full Body Visualization as described previously.
Begin rocking your physical body from side to side slightly, about one inch in either direction. Continue the rocking motion, to the left, and back to the right, and so on. Attempt to see your body rocking as a dark, body-shaped field of energy, rocking from side-to-side. See it from within and without.
When you have achieved this, when you can visualize your “energy body” rocking with your physical body, begin to lessen the rocking motion of your physical body. Slowly lessen the side-to-side rocking of your physical body to the point where you are barely moving. Focus on your inner visualization of your “energy body” rocking back and forth. Continue to lessen the actual physical rocking motion to the point where you are barely moving at all, and remain at that point for a while. Continue to visualize your “energy body” as a dark field of energy in the shape of your actual body moving side-to-side. Concentrate on your inner “energy body” rocking side-to-side. Attempt to increase this motion, while still lessening the actual motion of your physical body. Then, cease all outer movement, and maintain only the rocking of your visualized “energy body.”
(It may help to also focus first on the skin of one side of head, and then the other side, back and forth, while still rocking and as you stop, as described in previous "Traveling Focus" exercise)
Increase the side-to-side movement of your inner body while remaining physically still. Continue this for as long as possible. The goal is to feel your 'Inner body' rocking outside of the physical restrictions of your actual body. It's actually a "slight O.B.E."
(One time at the end of this exercise I was sitting there, perfectly still, feeling as if my “inner body” were rocking a couple of inches to each side, rocking well outside of my physical body, and as I allowed it to rock once more toward my wife, who was asleep in bed beside me, suddenly with no thought or prior planning other than an intuition*, I felt myself release energy of some kind in her direction with a slight physical wave of my hand. It was as if I had built it up by rocking for so long and then just released it at her. She immediately started and woke up as if she had felt herself struck by it, with no later memory of why she had awakened.)
*An intuition that if I did this, she would awaken.
"Third-Eye Focus"
Expansion of awareness and intuition
(Seriously, that’s what it seems to do)
This is a simple one. Sit comfortably, relax, clear your mind of distractions, and focus your whole attention on a point equidistant to and slightly above your two eyes. (Yes, the proverbial “Third Eye)
Look for a sensation of inner pressure at a certain point. Then, using “Phantom Sight” as described previously if you can, close your eyes and using the index finger of your left hand (my preference) touch that spot lightly. See the point of contact as a glowing dot or round spot. Feel the contact; see that sensation as a glow. Press harder with the finger; see the glow intensify. Feel the increasing physical pressure; concentrate on it.
Now, lower your hand, and remember that tingling pressure sensation and the glow. Visualize it; feel it. Concentrate on that point, feed all of your focus into it; do not be distracted. At some point you may come to realize that the more you focus on it, the more it glows, and the more “pressure” that you feel at that point, although of course, no finger is present.
Continue this and the pressure builds until you feel it all the way at the back of your head, as if it penetrated right through your skull. Your eyes feel almost crossed with the sensation of pressure.
The logical conclusion of this is to see a round, very bright light emanating from your “Third Eye” region. Like a small sun shining inside your head, with intense tingling and pressure between the eyes. It feels like electricity. It feels like energy. It also feels like somehow, you are looking out of that spot with both your eyes in some non-physical way. Like the pressure is related to your visual cortex or feeds into it somehow.
"Outside-Inside"
Exploring perception
In a relaxed position, clear the mind. Then raise a hand to where you can see it. Move your index finger. Feel the movement. Concentrate on the sensation of movement. Where is that sensation happening? In your finger? No, it is happening in your mind. The sight of the finger moving, is also in your mind.
Eyes closed now, move the finger. Feel the motion. A squirming sensation in your mind, perhaps centered somewhere behind the eyes at more-or-less the center of your head. Concentrate on this sensation. Focus and concentration can magnify it and clarify it.
Notice that all movement, all sensation of movement, happens in the mind as these ‘squirmy’ sensations, and we unconsciously translate them to perceived external sources. It matters not if it’s movement of your own body or the perceived movement of another body or thing. If you see your dog move, you will feel it as a squirming sensation in the mind. The movement of the second hand on a clock produces a similar feeling. Likewise even the flickering of a candle flame. All perceived motion is translated to these inner purely mental sensations, sensations that we tend to not recognize as purely mental at all.
"Time-Lapse"
Explores the nature of memory and the concept of past and present
Relax as usual.
Then pick a moment in time.
What I mean is, choose a moment and demarcate it in your mind somehow. Perhaps you close your eyes, open them for a brief moment, and then close them again, remembering that flash of reality that you saw. Or sound a small bell and remember the sight of the room around you at that moment. There are many ways in which to mark a moment in time.
Then, meditate on that moment with eyes closed for a few seconds, and try to see it as clearly as possible. (Salvia greatly enhances this capability)
Open your eyes, and note the passing of moments as you normally would, but at the same time continue your intense visualization of that one, single, short moment that you have marked in your memory, now receding into your past.
Try to not be distracted. Because you will be. This is the hard part.
Keep your eyes open; your main focus on that past moment, keep it alive in your mind, but note also the normal passage of time, moment-by-moment, as you normally would. Recall that moment with all your senses, not merely sight, and note the passing present moments with all your senses as well. Meditate on both at the same time.
Eventually it can happen that you can recall that past moment so well and see it so clearly that it becomes no different from all the new moments that you are experiencing normally in time. No different, as in, just as vivid, just as real as your present is.
Just as real as your present is. Seriously. As if the real reason that you can remember it, is that you are still there looking at it.
Perhaps the past only seems to fade when in “normal mind,” and in actuality it is only your perception of it that fades; perhaps that past moment, and indeed all past moments, are still real, as real as the present is, and we are still there perceiving them. Or so it certainly seems in this meditation.
Variation: The Finger Snap
Snap your fingers. Hear the sound, focus on it, retain it, remember it, remain focused on it. You will (perhaps) find that you can remain in the state of hearing that very brief sound almost indefinitely. You can examine the sound over and over, "roll it around" in your mind, and remain present in that past moment as if time had stopped for you. As if you were accessing your past mind at the moment of hearing the snap, and have hit some kind of "hold button." Again, as if part of you is still there in that past brief moment, still listening to it.
Continued:
PART 4
Salvia Tricks and Useful Meditations (Part 3)
PART 3 (OF 4)
"Inner Rocking"
Experience your “Energy Body”
Sit in a relaxed position, either cross-legged or in a straight chair (no armrests).
Close your eyes and concentrate on your mental image of your body, using the techniques explained in Full Body Visualization as described previously.
Begin rocking your physical body from side to side slightly, about one inch in either direction. Continue the rocking motion, to the left, and back to the right, and so on. Attempt to see your body rocking as a dark, body-shaped field of energy, rocking from side-to-side. See it from within and without.
When you have achieved this, when you can visualize your “energy body” rocking with your physical body, begin to lessen the rocking motion of your physical body. Slowly lessen the side-to-side rocking of your physical body to the point where you are barely moving. Focus on your inner visualization of your “energy body” rocking back and forth. Continue to lessen the actual physical rocking motion to the point where you are barely moving at all, and remain at that point for a while. Continue to visualize your “energy body” as a dark field of energy in the shape of your actual body moving side-to-side. Concentrate on your inner “energy body” rocking side-to-side. Attempt to increase this motion, while still lessening the actual motion of your physical body. Then, cease all outer movement, and maintain only the rocking of your visualized “energy body.”
(It may help to also focus first on the skin of one side of head, and then the other side, back and forth, while still rocking and as you stop, as described in previous "Traveling Focus" exercise)
Increase the side-to-side movement of your inner body while remaining physically still. Continue this for as long as possible. The goal is to feel your 'Inner body' rocking outside of the physical restrictions of your actual body. It's actually a "slight O.B.E."
(One time at the end of this exercise I was sitting there, perfectly still, feeling as if my “inner body” were rocking a couple of inches to each side, rocking well outside of my physical body, and as I allowed it to rock once more toward my wife, who was asleep in bed beside me, suddenly with no thought or prior planning other than an intuition*, I felt myself release energy of some kind in her direction with a slight physical wave of my hand. It was as if I had built it up by rocking for so long and then just released it at her. She immediately started and woke up as if she had felt herself struck by it, with no later memory of why she had awakened.)
*An intuition that if I did this, she would awaken.
"Third-Eye Focus"
Expansion of awareness and intuition
(Seriously, that’s what it seems to do)
This is a simple one. Sit comfortably, relax, clear your mind of distractions, and focus your whole attention on a point equidistant to and slightly above your two eyes. (Yes, the proverbial “Third Eye)
Look for a sensation of inner pressure at a certain point. Then, using “Phantom Sight” as described previously if you can, close your eyes and using the index finger of your left hand (my preference) touch that spot lightly. See the point of contact as a glowing dot or round spot. Feel the contact; see that sensation as a glow. Press harder with the finger; see the glow intensify. Feel the increasing physical pressure; concentrate on it.
Now, lower your hand, and remember that tingling pressure sensation and the glow. Visualize it; feel it. Concentrate on that point, feed all of your focus into it; do not be distracted. At some point you may come to realize that the more you focus on it, the more it glows, and the more “pressure” that you feel at that point, although of course, no finger is present.
Continue this and the pressure builds until you feel it all the way at the back of your head, as if it penetrated right through your skull. Your eyes feel almost crossed with the sensation of pressure.
The logical conclusion of this is to see a round, very bright light emanating from your “Third Eye” region. Like a small sun shining inside your head, with intense tingling and pressure between the eyes. It feels like electricity. It feels like energy. It also feels like somehow, you are looking out of that spot with both your eyes in some non-physical way. Like the pressure is related to your visual cortex or feeds into it somehow.
"Outside-Inside"
Exploring perception
In a relaxed position, clear the mind. Then raise a hand to where you can see it. Move your index finger. Feel the movement. Concentrate on the sensation of movement. Where is that sensation happening? In your finger? No, it is happening in your mind. The sight of the finger moving, is also in your mind.
Eyes closed now, move the finger. Feel the motion. A squirming sensation in your mind, perhaps centered somewhere behind the eyes at more-or-less the center of your head. Concentrate on this sensation. Focus and concentration can magnify it and clarify it.
Notice that all movement, all sensation of movement, happens in the mind as these ‘squirmy’ sensations, and we unconsciously translate them to perceived external sources. It matters not if it’s movement of your own body or the perceived movement of another body or thing. If you see your dog move, you will feel it as a squirming sensation in the mind. The movement of the second hand on a clock produces a similar feeling. Likewise even the flickering of a candle flame. All perceived motion is translated to these inner purely mental sensations, sensations that we tend to not recognize as purely mental at all.
"Time-Lapse"
Explores the nature of memory and the concept of past and present
Relax as usual.
Then pick a moment in time.
What I mean is, choose a moment and demarcate it in your mind somehow. Perhaps you close your eyes, open them for a brief moment, and then close them again, remembering that flash of reality that you saw. Or sound a small bell and remember the sight of the room around you at that moment. There are many ways in which to mark a moment in time.
Then, meditate on that moment with eyes closed for a few seconds, and try to see it as clearly as possible. (Salvia greatly enhances this capability)
Open your eyes, and note the passing of moments as you normally would, but at the same time continue your intense visualization of that one, single, short moment that you have marked in your memory, now receding into your past.
Try to not be distracted. Because you will be. This is the hard part.
Keep your eyes open; your main focus on that past moment, keep it alive in your mind, but note also the normal passage of time, moment-by-moment, as you normally would. Recall that moment with all your senses, not merely sight, and note the passing present moments with all your senses as well. Meditate on both at the same time.
Eventually it can happen that you can recall that past moment so well and see it so clearly that it becomes no different from all the new moments that you are experiencing normally in time. No different, as in, just as vivid, just as real as your present is.
Just as real as your present is. Seriously. As if the real reason that you can remember it, is that you are still there looking at it.
Perhaps the past only seems to fade when in “normal mind,” and in actuality it is only your perception of it that fades; perhaps that past moment, and indeed all past moments, are still real, as real as the present is, and we are still there perceiving them. Or so it certainly seems in this meditation.
Variation: The Finger Snap
Snap your fingers. Hear the sound, focus on it, retain it, remember it, remain focused on it. You will (perhaps) find that you can remain in the state of hearing that very brief sound almost indefinitely. You can examine the sound over and over, "roll it around" in your mind, and remain present in that past moment as if time had stopped for you. As if you were accessing your past mind at the moment of hearing the snap, and have hit some kind of "hold button." Again, as if part of you is still there in that past brief moment, still listening to it.
Continued:
PART 4
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