SPIRITUAL REBIRTH. SALVIA DIVINORUM.

EXPERIENCE

Years: 20 (7 years ago)

SET: I was on holiday in Amsterdam. The exact place where I had the experience was Vondel park, in a meadow with trees and a pond in front of it. The park, being in August, was full of people doing various activities. The important thing, however, is that in that place people feel freer to do what they want to do, always respecting others.

My sitter and I isolated ourselves in this quiet place, there were no other people at that time.

I don't remember the exact time but we were in the middle of the afternoon.

SETTING:

For about a year I have seriously wondered why I was taking a psychedelic journey. I mean, what was I aiming for? In addition to simple curiosity, was there anything else? It was as if I was drawn to these experiences. The feeling of "yes, I want to do it", but why? Who makes you do it? And then, do I want to go deep or not?

A year before embarking on this experience I started to get some culture on Salvia Divinorum. The sources of information thanks to the internet are many. There are few books that speak extensively about it.

But most of the experiences I was reading were definitely challenging. Many describe it in distressing, harsh ways. A terribly demanding plant.

An experience that can open very distant doors for you but that can somehow mark you.

I wanted to do it, I wanted to have a concrete, profound spiritual experience. I wanted to understand what "spiritual experience" meant.

On the third day of the holiday I take the mushrooms for the first time, the cubensis: 2.5 g of Mexican Gold. The experience was very bland for me, some visuals, yes, but nothing special. I know well that with that dosage you can already have excellent trips full of ideas and insights, but psychologically and internally I was already thinking of the Salvia that I would have smoked two days later.

Mentally, just before having the experience, it was as if there was a mental vacuum. I didn't know what to think and honestly I didn't have any particular thoughts. "Who knows what can ever happen, what will I ever see" I wondered at most.

DOSAGE: 0.25g of 5X extract

METHOD: weed smoked in two large hits from a bong without exhaling between one and the other, lit with a windproof lighter (important).

The sitter turns on my bong, while I wait to inhale a sort of challenge like “come on let's see if there really exist other dimensions and things like that”. I inhale a big draw, hold back, inhale again with full lungs and mentally repeat to myself “well I'm still here”, after a few seconds and I can no longer hold the vapors. I exhale without even realizing it and close my eyes.

I open my eyes for a moment after an unspecified time and I can only see the sitter's face multiplying in spirals of fractals.

At that moment I had the perception that he was a sort of "Virgil" who was about to accompany me into my hell.

I close my eyes.

I find myself in a supermarket near my house. A feeling from many years ago comes to the surface. I felt lost. In that supermarket many years ago I lost sight of my parents and it is the first time that I felt the feeling of being completely lost. I floated between the shelves.

At a certain point, from the corner of a shelf, reality began to split in two. At the same time, I felt myself split in two from the top of my head. As reality opened up, so did I. I have never felt such a strong and pure sensation. It looked like someone was opening me like a zip. At first I harbored a feeling of resistance inside me, it was extremely invasive. I literally felt half of my head going to one side and half to the other, leaving the void inside me. It was really like when you have to extract a tooth, I felt that kind of emptiness there, nerves in the wind. It was a sensation that gradually intensified, reaching its peak when it was the turn of the torso to divide. At that moment my resistance was out of control but completely in vain. The sitter told me that at that moment of the experience I was rolling. I didn't know, I had completely lost touch with the material dimension. At a certain point, an entity, from behind, without a defined shape, took something from my chest and tore it off. From here on, breakthrough. My person was no longer there, there was no more thought, there was no more time. "I was" become an atom of pure energy, in a dimension of pure entity. It was a whole to which I had always belonged. I was at home.

The dimensions at this point overlapped each other, as if there was some sort of book of the dimensions being leafed through. The description is incredibly difficult.

Suddenly I open my eyes. I was definitely bewildered. I asked my sitter if the experience was over. He looks at me and asks me: who are you with? I answer him "with myself". He tells me to sit down and close my eyes again. There is no memory of any other vision in the meantime. I open my eyes again after an unspecified time and at that point I reply "I'm with you, here in Vondel park ...". However, I was not really back. I felt something very strange inside me. I asked the sitter if you were still traveling and he said “I swear to you, you're back”. At that point I say to myself "well, in case I am still traveling, I will continue this journey, otherwise I am really back". It was as if I felt that inside me, inside my head there was a very tense and fragile thread that kept me from the ordinary dimension. If that thread had broken I think I would have gone mad. In retrospect, in fact, I defined it as "the fleeting border with madness".

I think that returning to the ordinary dimension was so difficult due to the fact that during the experience I had entered dimensions that I felt "more real than reality". I was at home, I was in the place where I have always been, timeless and immaterial, the "house of the soul". There was no duality, it was one.

In the days following the experience, I had a very strong energy center inside my chest. It was impossible not to notice. It was the point where the entity had torn me a negative thing that I had been carrying around for a long time. As said before, I did not believe in the existence of energy points within us, the chakras. However, that entity opened my heart chakra to me.

I am reborn. It is as if before the experience I had had a veil that prevented me from seeing, hearing, living life in a broader way. As if I were dissociated from reality. It is paradoxical that, through the extreme dissociation that Salvia makes you live, it allows you to go beyond certain mental walls, influences or previous experiences that somehow limit your perspective on reality (dissociating you) and, consequently, distance you from reality for what it really is.

The most difficult part for me was the return and, subsequently, come to terms with the lived experience. I kept asking myself "what is real?".

What is reality? After months of elaboration and integration (which took place thanks to writing and meditation) the answer I have given myself is: broad. It seems trivial, but the reality is simply much broader, much more complex and far beyond our ordinary receptive capacities. Its definition is useless as defining something implies putting “boundaries” on it, limiting it… and it was this process that did me no good.

It was therefore an incredibly profound, extremely strong and overwhelming experience.

I am reborn.

The rebirth, however, brought with it all its hardness. Like when you come into the world screaming, I screamed deep inside. I had to rediscover practically all aspects of life. From thinking to the norms of society, from my relationships to my decisions that I have made throughout my life. The essential difference when I woke up compared to natural birth is that all the questions and all the whys were not learned passively from one's family or school but pushed me to think, think, think. Periods of intense overthinking often occurred. One of the hardest things I had to face was not being able to talk to almost anyone about it. The only person who could hear this journey into other dimensions was the sitter with whom I had the experience, who had already experienced Salvia. For the rest, it was as if I were speaking a little empty, as if there was no possibility of serious dialogue. Taken by discouragement, I began a journey of inner exploration that led me to meditation and the study of art, as well as reading the famous psychonauts such as Mckenna or famous mystical writers such as Alan Watts.

It took me years to integrate the experience. Perhaps with psychological support, with a shaman or with a psychotherapist, this integration phase would have taken place more solidly and faster.

One of the more particular considerations I have made about this experience is that the substance has removed more than it has added. It took away all those layers that separated me from my essence. It took away the material world, it took away space and time, it took away my thoughts, it took away the ego to get to the essence. The entity also tore a dark part from me that I had been carrying around for years and that unknowingly dissociated me from the world for some time. By removing all of this, however, Salvia allowed me to be reborn.

Without this experience my life would certainly have been different.

In the end, the initial intentions to go deeper, to have a sacred, mystical, spiritual experience were much more than overcome. The dimensions that Salvia allows to explore are beyond any possible imagination.