Salvia Divinorum

It was 1998 or 1999, I think I was 17. I was living in grand junction Colorado with my dad and step mom.

I was really into the band “The Flaming Lips” and they had recently released their “Zaireeka” album. “ During 1996 and 1997, The Flaming Lips ran a series of events known as "The Parking Lot Experiments". The concept was inspired by an incident in Coyne's youth, where he noticed that car radios in the parking lot at a concert were playing the same songs at the same time, Wayne Coyne created 40 cassette tapes to be played in synchronization. The band invited people to bring their cars to parking lots, where they would be given one of the tapes and then instructed when to start them. The music was "a strange, fluid 20 minute sound composition".

I was very much into our dynamic and subjective experiences we had as humans with the world around us.

We were at my best friends house in the late summer or fall time. This is a rural house out in country. We had been experimenting with the music and we had also been watching the movie “Dune” one evening and someone that we knew showed up. He wasn’t like a good friend of ours but we all knew him and known that he had left Colorado for a time. This would happen occasionally, people we knew would leave junction and go away and then come back with stories of their adventures. This person showed up with something he brought back from his time in Oaxaca, Mexico. He pulled out this ziploc bag with these larger dried leaves in it. He said that it was sacred and it’s not like dope and you don’t just smoke it to get stoned. Some of my friends were joking around but I had a different approach and took his words seriously. I had recently within the last couple years seen a movie called “Emerald Forest” and had looked into the topic of vision quests as much as one could back in 1998. I was very intrigued by inducing vision or flight. I almost feel like I could do this when I was younger so I was excited. This guy said we had to have a bong or something with water as it will allow for bigger hits and we wouldn’t even waste our time with any conventional pipe or anything. So as our tribes resident (tool maker) , I drove the 4 miles to my house to get my bong. I realized more recently that it was on this drive to my house and back that I was creating the environment and mindset for this upcoming experience.

Upon arriving back at my friends house, as I was the person supplied the device I was given the opportunity to go first. The guy that brought the salvia provided some brief instructions like, you might want to get rid of stuff in your hands or laugh and stuff so we should sit down and take three big hits and hand the bong to someone else. After my three big hits, I felt myself talking rapidly to the 7 to 10 people that were there. I could tell they were laughing at me because my words weren’t making sense but I was trying tell them very important things. Right after that, my perspective left my body to be about 4 feet behind and above myself. I saw everyone sitting there looking at me. Then quickly after that I felt a vertical rectangle about 5 inches wide and 15 inches tall heat up on the center of my chest and solar plexus. I was trying to tell people. This edge of this rectangle (a monolith like 2001) was sharp and hot and out of the center shot a beam of light light a doorway. I looked in front of me and the room we were in disappeared and waves of energy lapped up on edges of this doorway and path that lead from my chest out to infinity. In the distance was a silhouette of person, hand down at their sides with their palms facing me. A classic Christ or “lady” image. I don’t know how long I experience this but in earth time? about 7 minutes after my dose and trying to talk and then laughing I quickly came to. Fully sober and wasn’t able to share my experience well, like trying to recall a dream that is fluid and forming as you tell it as you can tell where it started or what the sequence was.

This is the only time I did saliva. It was life changing. It was quite different than all my experiences with LSD or Mushrooms. Family and the more fundamental religious community I was part of from 2001 to 2016 would attempt to explain this experience away and invalidate or reduce to a simple drug influence.

I’ve been very grateful to learn more recently about this experience and it’s positive influence on my life.