Beyond the beyond

I used s. divinorum again this weekend...on Friday, instead of sitting on the meditation cushion I lay reclined in bed in near total darkness. As I exhaled I tried to hold on somehow, to see if I could distinguish between 'this side' and 'that side,' to note the moment of transition. But like the experience of undergoing aneasthesia, that moment was past after I'd already lost focus on my mission.

A particularly powerful experience, with much buffeting of the body by jangly electric sensations. I was beset by a ring of force that commenced at my feet and began climbing my body with probing and insistent fingers. I could see lines of bright energy like Hephaestus' booby trap harness projecting out and down towards the top of my head (my eyes were closed), and as the ring climbed my body I began to resist, because on the other side of the force lines and through some glittering aperture I became nought but diffuse blue sparks. I gave up resistance and burst through to find that the blue sparks were underlying everything--somehow this blue goo was the benign undergirding of sentience in the Universe, diverse with multitudinous pinhead dancing angels like wee members of the Blue Man Group. I had a good laugh with some old acquaintances before realizing I'd just re-lived my physical birth in reverse.

Saturday afternoon in the same setting I tried it again, but with a bit more light in the room peeping around the dark blue curtains. I was in a shallow grave under a piece of tin and some men were trying to bury me by stomping on the tin and shoveling more dirt on top. Not pleasant. After a few minutes I realized the men were some constrution workers in the yard next door gathering tools together at the end of their day. What significance those tiny clinking sounds they made had for my salvia journey! The faint and diminishing light I'd seen around the tin as it was pushed down was actually the deepening twilight of the early evening.

I re-read Huxley's



and for some reason found it quaint, naive, and aggravating. His arrogance about Art, his contemptuous treatment of it and assumptions about its value to users of entheogens frustrated me.