Observations placeholder

Extract from The Hellraiser Leaf - Salvia divinorum - by Zen Priest EROWID experience vaults

This time I’m running (got some legs back!) in black woods and it’s so, so black. Night was never this black. Running, running all this fucking running but the weird thing is I’m also running on a stairwell platform, or should I say attempting to outrun the stairs themselves, for they were dissolving both in front and behind me with each step taken. I started to outrun them faster and faster but the stairs would keep pace creating a disappearing cube no larger than the width of each step. Steps would materialize as I ran forward, and then disintegrate as I stepped off no matter how fast I ran. The world started spinning and churning once again and in no time I was running upside down, sideways, and at diverse 90 degree angles without ever falling, losing place – or making any kind of headway at all in this E.M. Escher pursuit to nowhere.

And then for the briefest instant my entire surroundings exploded into what seemed like some colorless celestial realm, with this monstrously large, intensely bright face covering my entire line of vision. The face before me felt comforting and maternal, and though I could not place it was for once unafraid, and I can make out just enough objects around me to see that I am momentarily back in the hermitage library I was in a zillion years ago. ……… I ‘m trying to look closer at this increasingly familiar face but the light is so damned bright and I have no time at all to assimilate it to my surroundings or ground myself mentally as to what has happened - or even calm myself and possibly go with the end experience in a relatively calmer manner. I’m starting to gather thoughts and then suddenly all is black once again and there is no time for any rationalization or reason…

Cut back to running, never having stopped. To either side of me there are these ashen, phantasmal strobes accompanied by a pitched hum that softened to a low throb as the strobes rapidly decelerated to where they now revealed themselves as minuscule bodies with exaggeratingly enlarged heads. Swollen to at least 10 times the comparative size the heads looked like huge cartoons, like those stupid spring-neck bobbing figures people insist on placing in their back car window for the tailgaters’ entertainment. But as the faces continued to slow and materialize they were anything but funny. I clearly recognized most, although a few – if not immediately familiar - struck cords of nostalgic recognitions...

There were no strangers.

Mother…Father…family…friends…lovers…

A gauntlet of the loved and lost.

And with each and every face flashed an instant memory where I had hurt, disappointed, or let each down in some deeply personal, irreparable way or another. I have led a diversely tainted past, but the last 20 years were exemplary ones of fond memories, reconciliations and contentment... but this little cosmic parade only proved once again that in each and every one of us are buried gilts so deep that they never recede - always lurking beneath the folds of our subconscious. On and on they went. The visions would just saunter by and I would remember and lament the lifetimes of irretrievable regrets. My angling body skittered forward on this stairway of self torment now trying to outrun these vaporous intrusions to my long worked for inner peace, trying not to look up as I could not keep up with the endless stream, and therefore had nothing to say, nothing to offer but my own hell-racked conscience that may be forgiven but could never be appeased in my own heart.