No and I think most people who use the phrase "ego death" to describe their experiences are just throwing it around without any understanding of what it might mean or what it might have meant to the people who popularized the term. Most people who I've heard use the term have not been very intelligent, and have used it casually like it's just something that happens whenever you take a normal dose of whatever kind of psychedelic. I think it's also unhelpful that the word ego has very different meanings, both of which could apply to some aspect of psychedelic experience. Ego can mean an arrogant, self absorbed characteristic of the personality, or, as the people who popularized "ego death" probably meant by it, the first person, self-identified perspective.
I've experienced some states that were so bizarre and inconceivable and of a completely other kind from the mundane state of mind that it's completely impossible to communicate anything about them (if you want to get some idea of a state like that, a very easy, low risk, low cost way is nitrous oxide, i.e. whippets, from a cartridge, with a cracker. You can easily get completely out of your body and unable to process information or understand your own perspective in any kind of normal way with a single whippet. That being said, I don't encourage anyone to do drugs. If you want to do them, do them, if you don't, don't. Make your own decisions.) but even in the most confusing states, and even in states with an explicit sense of identification with things outside myself, including sober meditation experiences, the fact that I am having a first person oriented experience always remains there at some level. I'm sure people end up in states where that's not the case but I think it's probably pretty rare and/or accompanied by an inability to remember the event.
Everything I've heard in person about salvia has been extremely negative, though I have read a few (very few) reports online from people who had good experiences. Do you like it? Do you have something interesting to share about it?
I wouldn't say it's positive, nor negative. But, if you smoke the extract (say.. around 12x), and have a small bowl of it (a whole bowl will light up in one hit), you will have a very intense experience.
Things that sometimes happen: becoming the couch.. or the walls. Melding with your surroundings to the point that you no longer recognize where "you" begin and your environment ends.
Also, diimension reduction (everything collapsing into a two-dimensional plane), as well as weird time-loop glitches, where you percieve the sounds of coming back more than once, giving the illusion that you skipped ahead with your perceptions of time somehow. Very disorienting.
Also, there can be a strange sensation that you might have plausibly began the trip as someone else in the room. As you get re-situated back into your own "self", you can't ever be totally sure that you were always you. Sure, you will have your memories back and all that, but there is a distinct sensation that you could have just switched places / consciousnesses.
I had good extract, and shared it with strong warnings with several people. Many of them had "bad" experiences IMHO because they didn't fully and truly respect my warnings about the experience. I don't know what they were expecting, but what they got was very often far weirder than what they were after. The first time I had a real solid salvia experience, it lasted a few minutes. I thought about it the rest of that night, trying to interpret my experience. Years and years have gone by, and I still think my knowledge of self with regard to attachment to my material physical form is most strongly informed by that experience.
I wound up trying to dig through my bathtub because I thought there was a secret underground palace made of gold. It was weird. Only lasted about 30 minutes.
Very interesting. Thanks. I did try it once many years ago but I think the extract we had was somehow bad (much weaker than it should have been). After doing a few of the biggest hits in a row that I could (since it wasn't working previously), I eventually got a massive increase in gravity, the feeling of melting into the couch, the dimensional flattening thing, and the time stuttering/looping thing (I've also experienced this time effect on psilocybin), but they only lasted for a moment and were probably way less intense than the typical successful trip. I've heard a lot of reports online and in person form people who describe the kind of entering of a black void experience the other user is writing about (though people I've talked to mostly interpreted this negatively). Do you have any reference for this experience on salvia?
Also, would you say there's a sense of meaning, "communication", "being tapped into something", etc., or "emotional significance", "emotional progress", type of experience on salvia or is it mostly just hyper-weird perceptual and cognitive effects?
I don't have any reference to the "black void" thing, and I suspect that everyone will have different experiences (or interpretations) of the transistion between states.
Regarding communication / being tapped into something, etc. I would say that my experience was not directly "spiritual". My state of mind prior to the trip was very analytical / scientific. My understanding of the universe was shattered by the experience. For the first time, I understood consciousness as something of a continuum, and that any distinctions humans make with regard to "levels" of consciousness in sentient beings are fairly arbitrary. To be clear, I came out of this experience with the idea that even a single electron can have an awareness / consciousness, albeit on a very simplistic and alien level.
My thoughts about death have been greatly influenced by this as well. I was pretty strongly atheist up until this point. I did not suddenly have an epiphany about religion, or anything like that, but I completely discarded the false certainty that I had previously held that there would be no experience after death. I'm now feel pretty certain that death is a transition. At no matter what time scales a person or being dies, the consiousness must transisition from the state of being alive, to the state of being dead. It seems to me, after this experience, that the physical material for this transisition no longer determines existence, but rather form. Further, forms which we may be less and less familiar may experience the passage of time in ways that we have not, in our human lifetimes, anticipated.
Basically, if we could somehow zoom into the "moment of death" of any particular conscious being, I expect to find something akin to the mandlebrot fractal, where there really is no defined edge at any scale. Salvia has helped me realize that the possibilities of sentient experience within arbitrarily small units of time can remain unbounded.
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superesper ago
No and I think most people who use the phrase "ego death" to describe their experiences are just throwing it around without any understanding of what it might mean or what it might have meant to the people who popularized the term. Most people who I've heard use the term have not been very intelligent, and have used it casually like it's just something that happens whenever you take a normal dose of whatever kind of psychedelic. I think it's also unhelpful that the word ego has very different meanings, both of which could apply to some aspect of psychedelic experience. Ego can mean an arrogant, self absorbed characteristic of the personality, or, as the people who popularized "ego death" probably meant by it, the first person, self-identified perspective.
I've experienced some states that were so bizarre and inconceivable and of a completely other kind from the mundane state of mind that it's completely impossible to communicate anything about them (if you want to get some idea of a state like that, a very easy, low risk, low cost way is nitrous oxide, i.e. whippets, from a cartridge, with a cracker. You can easily get completely out of your body and unable to process information or understand your own perspective in any kind of normal way with a single whippet. That being said, I don't encourage anyone to do drugs. If you want to do them, do them, if you don't, don't. Make your own decisions.) but even in the most confusing states, and even in states with an explicit sense of identification with things outside myself, including sober meditation experiences, the fact that I am having a first person oriented experience always remains there at some level. I'm sure people end up in states where that's not the case but I think it's probably pretty rare and/or accompanied by an inability to remember the event.
belphegorsprime ago
Salvia.
superesper ago
Everything I've heard in person about salvia has been extremely negative, though I have read a few (very few) reports online from people who had good experiences. Do you like it? Do you have something interesting to share about it?
belphegorsprime ago
I wouldn't say it's positive, nor negative. But, if you smoke the extract (say.. around 12x), and have a small bowl of it (a whole bowl will light up in one hit), you will have a very intense experience.
Things that sometimes happen: becoming the couch.. or the walls. Melding with your surroundings to the point that you no longer recognize where "you" begin and your environment ends.
Also, diimension reduction (everything collapsing into a two-dimensional plane), as well as weird time-loop glitches, where you percieve the sounds of coming back more than once, giving the illusion that you skipped ahead with your perceptions of time somehow. Very disorienting.
Also, there can be a strange sensation that you might have plausibly began the trip as someone else in the room. As you get re-situated back into your own "self", you can't ever be totally sure that you were always you. Sure, you will have your memories back and all that, but there is a distinct sensation that you could have just switched places / consciousnesses.
I had good extract, and shared it with strong warnings with several people. Many of them had "bad" experiences IMHO because they didn't fully and truly respect my warnings about the experience. I don't know what they were expecting, but what they got was very often far weirder than what they were after. The first time I had a real solid salvia experience, it lasted a few minutes. I thought about it the rest of that night, trying to interpret my experience. Years and years have gone by, and I still think my knowledge of self with regard to attachment to my material physical form is most strongly informed by that experience.
Grifter42 ago
I wound up trying to dig through my bathtub because I thought there was a secret underground palace made of gold. It was weird. Only lasted about 30 minutes.
superesper ago
Very interesting. Thanks. I did try it once many years ago but I think the extract we had was somehow bad (much weaker than it should have been). After doing a few of the biggest hits in a row that I could (since it wasn't working previously), I eventually got a massive increase in gravity, the feeling of melting into the couch, the dimensional flattening thing, and the time stuttering/looping thing (I've also experienced this time effect on psilocybin), but they only lasted for a moment and were probably way less intense than the typical successful trip. I've heard a lot of reports online and in person form people who describe the kind of entering of a black void experience the other user is writing about (though people I've talked to mostly interpreted this negatively). Do you have any reference for this experience on salvia?
Also, would you say there's a sense of meaning, "communication", "being tapped into something", etc., or "emotional significance", "emotional progress", type of experience on salvia or is it mostly just hyper-weird perceptual and cognitive effects?
belphegorsprime ago
I don't have any reference to the "black void" thing, and I suspect that everyone will have different experiences (or interpretations) of the transistion between states.
Regarding communication / being tapped into something, etc. I would say that my experience was not directly "spiritual". My state of mind prior to the trip was very analytical / scientific. My understanding of the universe was shattered by the experience. For the first time, I understood consciousness as something of a continuum, and that any distinctions humans make with regard to "levels" of consciousness in sentient beings are fairly arbitrary. To be clear, I came out of this experience with the idea that even a single electron can have an awareness / consciousness, albeit on a very simplistic and alien level.
My thoughts about death have been greatly influenced by this as well. I was pretty strongly atheist up until this point. I did not suddenly have an epiphany about religion, or anything like that, but I completely discarded the false certainty that I had previously held that there would be no experience after death. I'm now feel pretty certain that death is a transition. At no matter what time scales a person or being dies, the consiousness must transisition from the state of being alive, to the state of being dead. It seems to me, after this experience, that the physical material for this transisition no longer determines existence, but rather form. Further, forms which we may be less and less familiar may experience the passage of time in ways that we have not, in our human lifetimes, anticipated.
Basically, if we could somehow zoom into the "moment of death" of any particular conscious being, I expect to find something akin to the mandlebrot fractal, where there really is no defined edge at any scale. Salvia has helped me realize that the possibilities of sentient experience within arbitrarily small units of time can remain unbounded.