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The New |
Crocodiles and BananasA multi-perspective report Substances: Salvia divinorum December 31st, 1996 I took approximately 30 dried leaves of Salvia divinorum, crushed them by hand, placed them in a mason jar, and soaked them in about 1/2 cup of denatured alcohol. I let this soak for about 2 hours, then decanted the alcohol into a small rectangular dish, added about 5 crushed leaves, and then set a small fan to speed the evaporation process. Since alcohol will absorb a small amount of water, the last bit of moisture was driven off by preheating the oven to 250 F, turning it off and placing the dish within, completely drying the extract in about 15 minutes. I scraped all material from the dish with a razor blade. I made this extract to allow my good friend F. the chance to experience Salvia with the advent of the new year. Prior to attempting this method, I had always used acetone as the solvent, with fairly good result. The denatured alcohol (pure ethanol with a small amount of methanol added) seemed a good alternative solvent as Valdez reported using aqueous methanol as a polar solvent to extract nonpolar hexane extracts, increasing the concentrations of salvinorin-a before using chromotographic separation to obtain the purified compound. My wife, S*, and I arrived at our friends' home, being received by him and his wife, F. & L. After exchanging amenities and becoming comfortable, we took 20 mg 2C-B, and proceeded to weigh whether he would like to try DMT or Salvia. He had a slight cold and thought he'd go with the milder trip, opting for the Salvia. I placed about 1/2 teaspoon of the concentrated form in a small pipe, telling him he had to take at all in, in several huge inhalations, while my wife recommended that he put a pillow on the floor so he could lay down afterwards and really get into it. He fired up the pipe, finishing it in two inhalations, and lay down on the floor, becoming very quiet. S*, being an experienced Salvia journier, shared her observations on the state with us while F. remained very quiet on the floor. However, he soon attempted to sit up and looking at his expression, it was quite clear that he was having an overwhelming experience. About 4 minutes had passed and he was still deep into it. In his attempts to sit up I could discern disorientation, and something I had never seen in my friends face before, fear! We are all very experienced trippers, F. & I having begun over 25 years ago, and seeing his expression of fear I was both amused and a little alarmed. I went by his side and told him it would pass. He sort of crawled away from his resting spot and mumbled that he would like it to end now. His wife came nearby and comforted him. After a few more minutes had passed, I suggested that he try to articulate the experience to help himself come back and he said, "Does crocodiles and bananas make any sense?" The three of us found ourselves laughing heartily at the intensity of my friend's experience. We were all very surprised and amused to see his bewildered reaction. As he finally began to come back he was able to provide us a very interesing account of his experience. He stated that there was also the distinct perception that this was all a big joke and that we were all in on it except for him. He was especially sure that S* was the engineer of the whole thing. He said that after taking the last hit and laying down, that was the last thing he remembered for awhile: It was just like being hit over the head with a baseball bat. As awareness resurfaced, he would perceive the room, but no sooner did he perceive it than he was rolled under again, becoming one with the totality of the cosmos. He would then roll back into the room again and see us briefly, knowing that he was about to be rolled right back under, and was fearful that this process was never going to end. He said the image that came to mind was being rolled up in straw mats, becoming one with the mat, with no differentiation between self/other. At one point, when he sat up and rested his hands on the carpet, he perceived himself as resting his hands on an ocean of fish, packed very tightly. As he rolled back into the room, he would perceive the floor as being about chest high, with only his upper torso and head emerging briefly, followed by becoming totally dissolved back into the ground. As he was comforted by his wife, he was concerned that he would take her under with him when the next roll came around. Thus in the intensify of the experience it was a total body/mind trip, with no ability to distinguish this as merely an altered state of consciosuness. This was the most powerful psychedelic experience my friend had ever had, bar none! He said, "It's right up there with birth and death!" Here is my friend's direct account of his experience:
"Even though I had a pretty good cold going I managed to take about 2 good hits one on top of the other and held it as long as I could. I followed this with one more huge hit that I started to choke on but managed to hold it in. As I leaned back I could hear my friends asking If I wanted a third but I think they realized that I had enough. I was barely hearing them as I laid back my head. It didn't come on slowly but more like being hit squarely over the head. "In a split second I was in another dimension and totally disoriented. It felt as if the whole room had rolled up like a big straw mat with me in the middle. I could feel my entire being rolling over and over in an almost mechanical way as if I would roll a certain amount, stop briefly, and continue. Sort of like a machine indexing. As I mentioned, it felt like I was inside a straw mat. Kind of like those little paper Chinese handcuffs that you put a finger in each end and the tighter you pull the more stuck you are. As I rolled around it felt like I was becoming the mat itself especially when it felt as though my face was turned down. It was like my face was just being flattened into part of the mat and becoming one with it. Sure am glad we never found that bigger pipe. "Even though Celtic whistle music was being played in the background, this whole part of the episode had a distinct jungle flavor to it. At times I got the impression that this rolling was taking place in a hut as part of a game that the other people present knew the rules to but I did not. Indeed it seemed as though I were providing them with wonderful and hilarious entertainment. I could hear them laughing but knew intuitively that it was not malicious. It was like they were all symapthetic and understanding but that seeing my befuddlement and knowing what I was going through was just so damn hilarious that try as they might they could not suppress their laughter. "At times I sensed something kind of like a crocodile and thinking back later it came to me that it was as if I was rolling inside the creature that would then change back into straw and also at times felt like it was made of canvas. There was some dim impression that this canvas crocodile was some sort of toy from my childhood, that somehow I recognized it briefly at times or that I had had a similar experience early in my life. My birth perhaps? I guess being confined at times in a tubelike opening pretty much begs the analogy. "As I continued to "roll" I suddenly realized that with each full turn I would lock into or "index" to a place where I could briefly see through an opening into the room. It was as if the opening in whatever it was I was in would line up with an opening into the "reality" of the room and the people there. I could see their luminescent faces and quickly I (and the entire scene) would be rolled over again not to see them until the next time around. It was like a total disintegration and partial reintegration each time. Although I was later told that I had crawled about the floor somewhat, It felt to me like each time around I would just appear up through the floor or more correctly, be recreated out of the floor. Everthing was one continuous fabric. "The floor in my basement is a thick blue shag carpeting and it seemed like I was coming back up through water. Indeed there were times when it seemed that the floor level was up to my waist and that half my body was below the "water". As this went on I admit that it began to scare me that each time around I tried to maintain the room reality and be with my wife and friends but I couldn't maintain it and would be swept under again. I wish I could have relaxed more and just gone with it. My wife later told me that at this moment I looked more scared than she had ever seen me. She said I had told her that I wanted to come back to her. She had come over to prop up one side of me and as my arm was around her and the room was dissolving again I remember thinking that she knew what was going on and in her loving way was going to either keep me in the room or be nice enough to go around the last few times at my side. As much as I really believed that, on the next go round I disintegrated again and rolled right on through her. "Slowly the times back in the room would get longer. At one point I looked again at the "water" and it was waving, rippling, glistening. As I looked more closely I could see that it was actually a bunch of bright blue fish all packed wrigging against each other as I laid waist deep within them. They sparkled and the sight was breathtaking as I watched them move as I put my hands right on them. There was not so much fear at this time, just full blown amazement. From this time I stayed, however tentatively, in the "room reality" and slowly began to come back to my original state. My wife and friends helped me to gradually reintegrate myself. The experience had lasted 15 minutes and it was a good 30 minutes or more until I was fully back. "I've worked with many different materials over the years but I can easily say that this was the most powerful experience I have ever had, and it's not even close. My first instinct was to never touch this stuff again, but after much reflection I'm not totally closed to it. Maybe having gone through the experience would enable me to relax and go with it just as relaxation is the only way to escape Chinese handcuffs. Since the experience I've also gone back to look at some prints by M.C. Esher wherein an interlocking crocodile motif forms an endless fabric. They definitely take on a different light now.
The experience was so incredible that my friend opted to postpone the DMT until another day. Having done both, S* puts DMT more on the level of the mushroom, and Salvia in a unique class of its own; the Salvia being much more powerful! So, if anyone has not had the Leaves of the Shepherdess grab them yet, I would suggest using denatured alcohol as the solvent, concentrating say 30 leaves down onto about 5, and then boldly proceeding, but also with circumspection: be sure to have a sitter watching over you!
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