I must relate the tellings of this truly ‘divine’ herb in my own words from my second smoking experience. I was tired and lazy before inhaling the smoke, but the aromatic smoke filled my body hollows and into all the cells almost instantly. My plans were a simple night walk to see the sky, but turned out to be way more than this.
I took my star map and laced up my combat boots and threw on my baja with an extra sweater underneath. -32 C outside, but I really craved to feel the cold on my body and hands for a short while. All my feelings were very pronounced, even leaving my flat felt like an ambitious journey somewhere… then it become more intense when I saw the nightsky.
It had not been adequate enough to see the stars here as of late because of the urban light pollution and density of the cumulonimbus clouds forming ethereal blankets in the blackness. But tonight, there were only wispy clouds, and hundreds of stars. The cold didn’t bother me, and I felt the sudden instinct to run, so I ran, to the river where no one was out, where I had silence to be with nature’s dark secrets and my inner more primal self…
All my limbs were loose and free, stomping the ground, and shaking the cold earth underfoot. I ran in circles, listening to the music of Nightbringer as it churned and churned on me, in and outside of me. I swore at the crescent moon, and heard the booming of the frozen ice. I heard wardrums, but they came as much from the music as from the distance. I kept being tricked that I was with a friend, and then thinking I was a viking nomad with a sparkling celestial garment, using the star map as my guide across the encrusted snowy landscape. There was an beautiful bluish hue around me, like a non-material robe, but only I knew it was there, and it was ethereal because it had a strange fabric to it.
Then I crossed a patch of ice, and took out my map again. I found the polaris like the axis of the night world deserving cyclic worship. I was just chanting the names of the stars, Pherkan! Altais! Sheliak! Kornephoros! Adhafera! Arcturus! Hyades! Then seized the Aldebaran with my eyes, the bright one, followed from the Big Dipper constellation across several lightyears of space in a single movement of my head. I felt so animalistic then, as if in a light trance, stomping the snow, pounding my chest, and raising my clenched fist and yelling to the sky in honor. I felt light footed, able to go over the deeper parts of the snow with ease. And again, started to feel as a viking again, holding the map out in front of me while walking, looking for something… land? my lost tribe? I am sure if anyone was around they would be quite intimidated.
I went to stand under a light but the sky became obscured by branches and ran back, and just stopped thinking anymore, I craned my neck up for several minutes letter the light of the stars filter down onto me like I was the vessel of their luminescence. I watched the reddish clouds formations hover over, concealing constellations but revealing clusters in the process. It appeared as some kind of reddish dark matter rather than clouds. Those glorious forms of the quantum world. The icy temperatures was seeping in now, and I began feeling a conscious reversion from the salvia effects. It has a nice aftertaste in the mouth when the energetic effects wear down. I walked back, the happiest I have been in a week, and now writing this.
I realized tonight a profound difference in the way we perceive creativity when under the influence of entheogens, contra whilst through higher physical or sensory stimulation like sex, art, or music. Firstly, these 3 things are greatly enhanced, though I have not had the opportunity to try and sexual things using shamanic herbs and mushrooms, I can admit at being moved entirely by the music I am listening to, and the pictures I see. In the purely sensory state of normal consciousness there always remains a form of attachment, or secureness, like we are not always surrendering to the stimulus given to us by Nature! With the Salvia for example, I let it wash over me without fear, and knew when not to take more than needed. Then all my dulled senses being overloaded with feeling and attraction. I always knew before exposing myself to entheogens, that it would be for spiritual or primal reasons, to go beyond just a ‘trip’ in the bedroom. I want to use it as a vehicle to open the nadi channels of my chakra system, to awaken intuitive creativity, to heal myself of social awkwardness, and possibly to transcend and go out of my body. My knowledge of these sacred plants continues to grow over on itself and refine my understanding of them, but my self and spirit remains open to the worlds it creates for me.
:aferalspirit: 