13 December, 2008 – 5:06pm
Last night I went to spend the evening with Michal and Ema down by the Thames in the south west. We drank cava and laughed through rapid fire anecdotes and conversation, and they cooked me some amazing food, the kind that only the Poles could serve.
A whole duck, jointed and cooked in an oven dish with garlic and marjoram, allowing the fat to fill up the bowl so the pieces of meat are dripping with it! We had the meat with some lovely salad, though this hardly detracted from the sheer fatty indulgence of the duck meat and the lovely bowl of hot tasty fat which we could dip meat and bread back into when we wanted another fix. Mmmmmmmm!
Then we retired to the carpet, moved the table and candles away, and got down to introducing Michal and Ema to salvia divinorum. The first time round Michal and I smoked it, but Ema was unable to inhale any at all. She coughed it straight back out. It was interesting as she often smokes things, she said afterwards that she had never had that before, it was as if the white smoke expelled itself from her, refusing to enter.
Everything always seems pregnant with meaning when you do salvia, so perhaps the Lady in her benevolence had decided that one of us needed to be sober for the first hit. It was handy that she was, as Michal took a lot and we needed an alert sitter to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or knock things over. Michal and I both lay down on the carpet facing each other. I had a fairly mild dose, I still knew I was on salvia and was feeling glad that Ema hadn’t taken any because I could see that blank look on Michal’s face, almost like a frightened animal, as he lost awareness of who he was or what was happening. As my sensations intensified, I saw Michal’s face turn green and elven, with energy flowing out of it in every direction like roots from a tree. Meanwhile, Michal was in another world in which his side of the room represented the world of life, while the side that I was on was stretching away from him into the past and death. During the experience he made a choice not to die yet, within the experience that death was just the return to a state before birth.
After some discussion, we all took it again. This time, I took a dose as big as my first dose from Kayla, enough so I completely lost all sense of who or where I was. From a kneeling position I slowly sank forwards into the carpet, between the two chairs Michal and Ema were sitting in.
It was terrifying in the way that my first high dose was terrifying, a sudden all consuming timeless terror. Reality, which was one and the same as the terror, floated upwards around me in rods or lines, and floated through me like burning pins and needles. I thought I might be better prepared for it, but it is difficult to take any lessons with you. You are just suddenly there again, caught in the terror. Yet there was a difference this time, because although I didn’t know who or what I was I did remember this sensation and terror. I was there on the carpet, and I was on my bed again, experiencing that first high dose dose of salvia I had with Kayla. It wasn’t even that I remembered it, it was actually the case that I was experiencing both together. Both experiences were the same moment: one timeless moment that I had returned to. And I knew that this place, this sensation, this terror, is what exists outside time.
I slowly returned and talked to Michal and Ema about their experiences, after we’d shared a massive bout of good hysterical laughter together. Their experiences were much more concrete and visual in many ways, but shared my trip’s preoccupation with time. We had been talking earlier in the evening about the past, both our shared past living in London, and stories of Poland and recent Polish history. Perhaps this shaped the direction of our experiences. Ema went back in time, to a very specific time, 1984 or 1985. Michal went back to his birth, his grandfather and father were sitting by his side, and he remembered into the future the whole of his life from the perspective of his unborn self.
When I write about the “terror” of the full salvia experience I don’t mean that it was a bad trip. Words like “good” and “bad” don’t really apply. It’s just very powerful and very frightening, but also wondrous to experience and to reflect on afterwards.
It’s hard to keep in mind as you seem to transcend your body that the experiences of salvia must reflect the physical situation of how you’re feeling and where you are. I wonder whether taking it on a green hill on a warm twilight evening would create a less terrifying and more benign experience. Or I wonder if terror is just my default state when stripped of any knowledge of who or what I am.
A few lines from a poem about salvia divinorum I read on the Erowid website keep coming back to me.
I had not expected fear, but terror came with her
and tho I sought a dying moment, she showed me a dying eternity
and tho I sought to bring wisdom into the real, she tore the real from me
and I was no more, and in unbeing, I lost my fear
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