The Ordinary Mystic

The Mazatec Indians use it in their spiritual rituals for healing and to gain answers. Modern-day shamans also use the plant called salvia divinorum in their quests for spiritual answers. No wonder it’s known as a teacher plant.

It is indeed incredibly unique in terms of its place in human culture, and it has risen from an enigmatic past to a place of controversy in modern culture. So does it have anything to offer the modern seeker? I believe that it does.

Its Mystical Origins

The Mazatec call the plant “ska Maria Pastora”, or “leaves of the Virgin Mary, the Shepherdess”. They believe that it was the Virgin Mary who gave it to them.

Botanists consider it a cultigen, and it does not flourish in the wild through pollination. Some reports mistakenly state that salvia divinorum only grows wild in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. This isn’t entirely accurate. The reality is that the Mazatec Indians who live in that region have cultivated the plant for hundreds of years. Without being cultivated its chances of survival are slim for one reason - it is essentially sterile. While in the wild it has been known to send leaves to the ground where they then start to grow roots, it is primarily propagated by human cultivation where cuttings are taken and then replanted.

Since it was first discovered by modern culture in the 20th century there have been a hand full of documented cases where cross-pollination did result in enough viable seeds to produce a new plant. This means that all the salvia grown today are clones of one of a handful of unique plants.

So here we have a plant that the Indian peoples believe was given to them by a divine being. They have cared for it, respected it, and learned from it. As others have noted, there is a symbiotic relationship between humans and this plant. It depends on human cultivation through cloning as its primary method of propagating itself. In turn, ska Maria pastora provides humans with a unique and powerful way to explore human consciousness. And many who have experienced its effects will say that the plant seems to have a consciousness of its own - perhaps a common consciousness shared between all the cloned offsprings.

I do not judge such cultures as the Mazatec for their use of mind-altering substances. Their practices show that, when approached in the right way, entheogens can be beneficial to society as well as the individual. It is with this in mind that I decided to explore what this plant has to offer and actually step into the salvia world.

My First Experience with Salvia Divinorum

One thing should be explained, and that is there is a difference between the method that the Mazatec use to ingest the plant and the method employed by many modern users. The Mazatec slowly chew the leaves, but many in modern culture smoke not just regular leaves but leaves that have been infused with higher concentrations of the active ingredient salvinorin A. These are identified as extracts. So 10x extract refers to leaves which contain, because of this infusion, 10 times the level of salvinorin A that is contained in standard leaves.

It was with 10x extract that I was introduced to the salvia world.

As many others have reported, the effects began dramatically upon exhaling after holding the smoke in for 15-20 seconds. The folds of the material I was sitting on began to glow and flow away from me, continuing off into some vanishing point. Pulled, stretched, or just flowing - I’m not sure which, but with the movement came a stretching musical note that turned into something that sounded like a jingle from a children’s TV show. It felt as if I had been singing the jingle all along and just incorporated it into this dream. My front teeth felt like they also were being pulled with the flow.

That was the extent of the visual experience which was nothing compared to what came next.

Somehow I “knew” at a deeper level that the lines flowing away from me were actually a community of beings that I can only describe as a cross between teletubbies and Floop’s fooglies (from the movie Spy Kids). They were all gathering to what I sensed was a huge tree. As they gathered they were accompanied by the jingle. The other day I was listening to that Beatles song “I am the Walrus” when I heard a part that reminded me of the feeling that I got from the salvia music.

Pretty creepy, actually. This was not a light, merry experience. The cartoon-like entities seemed to be chastizing me - as if I was supposed to be going with them but wasn’t being responsible enough to get with the program. I could feel a pulling sensation against my teeth in the direction of the beings. And then I noticed that the song was coming from my mouth. Not that I was singing, but the song, the pulling, and the gathering event were all one and the same thing.

The significant part of this is that, like a dream where you accept the absurd as reality without question or without even noticing how absurd it is, this experience became a new and accepted reality. There was no question in my mind that it was real, and no memory of what “reality” was prior to the start of the experience. That is the one fundamental difference between the effects of Salvia and that of other hallucinogens.

After a few minutes the effects began to wear off and I became more aware of my surroundings. Or rather, I began to interpret my surroundings in the “normal” way. With that came a few moments of disbelief as I started to remember who I was, where I was, and what I was doing.

Common Elements of the Salvia World

After a few experiences I’m come to recognize some common elements.

The Salvia People
There is always the sensation of the presence of other beings, typically cartoon-like. On some occasions they have the feeling of being family characters - mother, father, cousins. I believe that this is related to the dream-like quality of the salvia world. In how many dreams are you completely alone, without other characters as part of the story?

Visuals
The main visual component consists of lines that flow, as if everything in my field of vision is composed of lines. The direction is different each time. One time it flowed towards the source of music that I was playing. On another occasion the lines flowed into me, coinciding with a prickly physical sensation so that it seemed that the lines were glass daggers piercing my body.

The Soundtrack
There is always some type of “soundtrack” that forms the fabric of the salvia world. If I have actual music playing then that music becomes the structure of that world. But when no music is playing then it creates its own. It’s as if the salvia is saying “oh you don’t have music? Well then I’ll pull it out of you!” The music is also cartoon-like.

“I’ve been here before”
There is a feeling of familiarity that is more pronounced with each episode, and the strength of the familiarity is matched only by my amazement at how I could have forgotten it. Is it so familiar because it is really a part of myself that I’m usually not conscious of - until salvia reveals it? It has definitely become what salvia is for me, as if it exists as a real, distinct world within the plant, waiting for me to return.

So What is There to be Gained?

I have to honestly say that I do not get a “spiritual” feeling in the way that I expected. The salvia world that I enter is just as familiar as the non-salvia world. The beings have a sense of reality but seem like material beings, not ethereal. There is no pointing to a higher source. The concept of a higher source seems irrelevant - that is not their concern. All of the components come from material reality - the identity of the entities (mom, dad, cousins), the music, even the environment (in one case I felt as if I was on a farm).

I’m incredibly fascinated by the feelings of familiarity, as well as the music that is always present. I’m also fascinated by the similarity between my experiences and the experiences of others. What’s with the cartoon-like characters, and what is it about our brains that reacts to salvia in this way to create them (assuming they are not, in fact, independent beings)? Is it possible to communicate coherently with them? If so, can anything be learned? Can I get a handle on what the music is - maybe remembering it enough to repeat it upon returning? Can I achieve lucidity to the point of being able to be mentally in both worlds at the same time, or to be able to switch my focus at will?

There is still much to explore.

But perhaps a more sober lesson is how easily our sense of reality can be manipulated. How much of what we take for granted as reality is actually a manipulation?

Maybe the salvia people have the answers.

Salvia Wholesale

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 7:59 am and is filed under Consciousness, Salvia divinorum.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.