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Friday night I was tired, ending a full work week in which
I worked hard. I rested up in preparation for my experiment
and, the edge having been taken off my general exhaustion,
W herself tiredly downstairs watching TV, I decided to make
first acquaintance with the sage of the diviners. As I soon
discovered, this is definitely a power plant to be approached
cautiously with preparation and respect.
Entering the study I selected some music, Ensemble Pan's Isle
of St. Hylarion, music of Cypress from the 1400s, and put
it on to play on the CD Drive. Kaleidoscope screensaver enhanced
the calm beauty of the setting. Darkness was impracticable
at that time so I left a lamp lit. I then lit a candle in
the bedroom and came back into the study. Loading a pipe with
a leaf I noticed its unfamilar texture and flexion and, following
the written advice of some other anonymous adventurer, drew
deeply on the bowl of leaves as I set it aflame and held the
smoke for as long as I could.
The experience
has a steep on-ramp, no more than ten or fifteen seconds.
By the end of the first exhalation something was different,
a kinship with cannabis at first blush, but only at first
blush. I took a second draw and my sense of self was radically
altered in a way that seems difficult or impossible to describe.
At first I had the sense of being extremely narrow, squeezed,
almost flattened along the vertical length of my seated body.
It was weird in a dramatic and frightening way, and following
some once-adaptive childhood pattern I hid the pipe and bit
of leaf that remained, as though I had done something naughty
that needed to be hidden lest I be punished. I thought to
run down to W for an instant to tell her what I was going
through, but decided the better of it and resolved to ride
the wave out on this odd surf. Anxiously I stumbled awkwardly
back into the bedroom and blew out the candle, and then to
the bathroom to dump ash off the plate. How weird that we
stumble around on these legs; wouldn't it be infinitely easier
and more graceful to glide? At some point I realized I could
ride with the experience and my anxiety diminished, leaving
me freer to explore the intrigue of this newly discovered
dimension. I left the office and sat down on the bed.
Soon it seemed
that my identity--not my body, not my mind, but the very entirety
of my self and the fabric of its universe, was corrugated,
enfolded like an accordion. This corrugation existed in an
ordinarily invisible space, like the three-dimensional objects
so strangely visible in the "magic eye" paintings
after coming to an entirely different focus. The angular,
accordion corrugation of my identity within its universe's
fabric had a strange, giant-sawtooth-wave zigzag.
I thought of the
sawtoothwave-type zigzags I have seen in Huichol peyote art.
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interpreted those zigzags as flowing and liquid, with rounded
corners, while this was simutaneously structurally angular
and rhythmic. Also I thought of the paradox that the sound
of a sawtooth wave is a "buzz", the same term
used to describe the onset of an altered state of this nature.
I began to realize that this was fun, that the Salvia and
I had this shared secret of its tremendous power, and I
felt a familiar, trippy glee that I recognized from other
forays into psychedelic territory many years ago.
I
soon reloaded the bowl with a small leaf and drew deeply
again and while I drew, I seemed to be standing outside
and behind myself, watching a play or a moving painting
of which I was a part, or rather the whole animated tableau
of drawing on the pipe was simultaneously me and other than
me. As I drew on the bowl and sensorily experienced the
grainy, particulate quality of the dried burning plant material
with my mouth and lungs I had a distinct intuition that
it wanted to be smoked, that it spoke with me in a distinct
voice, or more than one voice, that it commented on what
I was doing, on the whole tableau, that it encouraged me
as I drew; there was an otherness to the voice that distinguished
it from the usual mental chatter, and I understood that
dialog with the voice was part of how one learned from the
plant.
During
another aspect of the experience, which first began to emerge
as I stumbled about, I seemed to be a shape:
I felt that I actually was this shape, which I interpreted
as a star, and that it had some symbolic significance for
me. I was this star, and I radiated light.
I
remember realizing the importance of dialogue with the plant,
and I remember beginning to ask it questions, but by the
time this kind of dialogue would have begun W came upstairs,
complaining about the window being open in the winter (which
I had opened to dissipate the smoke). I was not in a space
to interact effectively with W, and the plant's effect was
waning.
I
am interested in learning further from this plant, in a
measured, balanced way, to speak with and hear its many
voices and discover its what it has to teach.
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