Fortuitous Combination

Rue and Salvia

Substances: Salvia divinorum, Peganum harmala

The first move on was a few grams of rue mixed with ...otj's Smoking Blend half and half. I started on that about 10 PM and finished it about 11:00. At that time I also took some and chomped it down (quite tasty, I thought) with some Dr. Enuf -- a soft drink with cane sugar and B complex vitamins. At midnight, I stuck Pink Floyd's concert video _Pulse_ into the machine, cranked the stereo and launched into 3 leaves of Salvia I'd chopped up.

Halfway through the 3, I felt it was time to set the pipe in the pyrex pot I keep for safety purposes. The video stayed in the TV just fine, and I stayed outside of it, but there was a definite shift in the dimensios being presentd. I cruised past the old familiar "functioning under acid" point I lived so many hours at, and approached that scary loss-of-ego point. I hit that strata, and leveled out at the bottom of it. For the next two hours, I dodged up and down though that barrier a couple of tokes at a time. It took two more leaves to keep things moving during the two hours I spent. I'd climb into that quantum fog, and then coast back down, five or ten minutes per cycle. While above the ceiling, I was velcroed to the couch, but within 15 minutes, could rationaly decide whether to make another exploration. After two hours the video was coming to a close, and I'd decided I'd had enough. 30 minutes later, flaps down and air brakes on, and I'm typing fairly well.

I went outside for a walk while coming down. The clouds were hanging heavy over the mountains and were lit up from beneath by the lights of the towns nearby. I could definitely see the clouds boiling and moving through the trip fog, but I could also, simultaneously, see that they were just hanging there in the 'normal' sight. The duality was an interesting effect. Kind of a quantum mechanical perception, with me stuck in the box with Schroedinger's cat. We enjoyed the view.

Since I was going to be doing the rue, I held off on caffiene. I found myself with a headache about halfway through. I considered calling it off at that time, but found I could order the headache away. That's not working anymore, sadly. And I'm staying away from the caffiene until tomorrow. Ouch.

I found I was much more uncomfortable with the ego-loss state than I had been years past. I guess that just reaffirms that I like where mine is at now. And as far as the "function under", I frankly found little difference between that and normal functioning. Perhaps it's induced by prior years exploration -- a learned state. Or maybe this was the nromal state of affairs all along and opening these doors have just let me know that. But what's going on on the 'other side' is going on all the time. I think the difference is adhereing to the constructs that make social existence possible. No value judgements on that; it's just the way of things.