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.
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*”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)
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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.