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

BACKGROUND:
I’m 47 years old and until recently had considered myself quite the cocky Psychonaut. Since age 14, I have had mushrooms 6 times, DMT twice, Ayahuasca, and LSD well over 150 times (this last probably a low-end guesstimate).

Looking back on my younger years, the only mid-life crisis I ever experienced was at age 25, when I found myself incomprehensibly shocked that I had actually made it to that age alive...but life can itself turn around. I now have two Masters Degrees and am a (fully Ordained) Rinzai Zen Buddhist, (more than a few friends from the bad old days would shake their heads in disbelief at this…) with over 20 years experience in various forms of meditation as well as being a meditation instructor and lecturer on dream recall/analysis. Hence I nonchalantly believed my philosophical, psychological and spiritual strengths to be well above the norm. But as will soon be divulged my only worst enemy was my own self-righteous arrogance, which almost never failed to get me deeply in shit. I’ve also always had an obsessive interest in primitive tribalism (i.e., Shamanism), and looking back find it very strange that I had never heard of Salvia divinorum considering the vast info on the net...

THE HIT

Rich says to me “I brought something really special for a kickoff', pulling out this miniscule zip-lock of what looks like the tiniest most pathetic gram of black pot I have ever seen, his 2-chambered wooden pipe, tiny measuring spoons and small dropper vial of something he called 'Emerald Essence' (a sublingual tincture form of Salvia)...

“Seems you’re a little short, pal!” I laugh, pointing at the “pot”, which had never gotten me off past a mild buzz in the zillion times I've smoked it years back. “Not that! The juice is for you, Bro.” …………
“That’s ‘purple-sticky’ astronaut Sally D, brother! Forget about it. Just put 3 droppers full of the juice there in your mouth and hold it under your tongue and don’t swallow. It’s a little uncomfortable but keep it in best you can. She’s the Teacher Plant, and Bro… you’ll be more than a little amazed… ”

THE TRIP

I was about to call out and plead to them when at that precise moment there was no cause for further alarm or complaint - for I was now the little girl staring down where “I” had previously held my place in the ground. I turned around AS THE GIRL, looking at the reflection in the glass and then back down but there was no other body below - just an empty sidewalk and the flowing, hurried traffic...

When I turned and looked back up at my new mother I lived with new eyes, for I was Now, Then and Forever her only little girl…

Thoughts and projected memories reeled like I was experiencing a childhood and living it in flash-frame succession all the way from pre-adolescence to motherhood to old age all in a matter of mille-seconds. I had rapid-fire visions from playmates, friends and lovers up to what would be my three children not yet born. From marriage to old age to death, with no memory whatsoever to the thing that had previously lain at my tiny feet. It was NOT like I was standing there reminiscing...I was actually LIVING THESE YEARS as I stood and gazed at the empty street before me. 70 years? 75? 80? It did not measure in exact time but then what did anymore? I would freeze in the moment and then barrel off to another lifetime(s).