Great discussion on reverse tolerance... I'm going to swing back to the OPs original topic!
My work with Salvia began by smoking strong extracts. I started at 10x, had a series of hard-head experiences, and broke through on three tokes of 30x (my technique was terrible, so much was wasted). My goal was: As long as I could move and understand my movement as the effects kicked in, I would toke again. Another time after that I broke through on 20x, but a far easier trip than the 30x, much more in-control, much more playful and visionary.
Integration was very difficult with the sub-breakthrough doses as there wasn't much to integrate - except for the obvious Salvia-truth of plastic perception. All reality is simply what we believe to be true in the moment. There may be no reason or purpose to any of it - WE imbue our experiences with purpose, WE create our reality, and we do it for all the cosmos because we are of the cosmos. Salvia seems to make this kind of integration crucial: What people traditionally view as "real" may not be as solid as many think. We inherit human vessels, which are machines designed to perceive cosmic energy in a specific cross-section - a
hallucination, an illusion of "full" reality.
My big breakthrough on 30x carried a much easier, even automatic integration. It was a complete mind-melt of a trip, 6 on Siebert's SALVIA scale, though where he doesn't recommend it because of the amnesic element, there was no doubt in my mind that something big had happened, and while I couldn't remember many specifics of the trip, I very much noticed the effects.
It was all in empathy. The day after the breakthrough, everything seemed alive, and I felt newborn. I saw the waves of water and recognized something fundamental in them, recognized the living music of all the universe in them. I saw the flowers and leaves of a tree rustling in the wind and chills ran down my spine and somehow I knew that I had a deep personal connection to this tree - as if I had in fact lived its life, had been it entirely. Every insect and leaf and gust of wind, every brick and piece of sidewalk, every cloud and star - All were living, conscious, bathed in a sea of consciousness that moved through all perceivable phenomena.
This gave me a powerful boost to empathy and the way that I approached and thought about others. I feel to this day that every single person is myself (and vice versa with total equality) with a slightly different shape to their prism. I feel that all life is really energy, light, focused through temporary prisms (our machine bodies and brains) while we in fact share the very same light that gives us experience.
My perception of time itself changed. I realized that the universe simply IS, it is a shape, a spectrum, and within this is all change that will and can ever be. It's our machine-bodies that tie us to the arrow of time and the perception of one-dimensional one-directional change. There is in fact one moment which never ends, and we perceive this single moment as in constant flux. It's all in where you look - and how.
I also received another seemingly-new power - A strength over anxiety and stress. Having endured such an annihilating journey - experiencing the total dismantling of myself, becoming the void between cosmic breaths, and re-entering chaos and the tree of connected life and consciousness, feeling and seeing and knowing somehow in some nearby language the ineffable shape of it all - It has allowed me to approach any challenge without fear, to process violence and negative energy around me with serenity. The knowledge that, in the end, nothing really matters except for the weight we create, has freed me from a kind of bondage I never before realized I was in. I don't believe I have felt anger toward a human being since my experiments with Salvia. If that isn't a profoundly positive effect from half an hour of smoke-induced journeying, I don't know what is.
Meanwhile my old vision of death as simple oblivion has been wiped away, and it's very difficult for me to imagine death as anything other than a new transformation into the conscious energy we were before birth and will return to again. There is a new fear in my mind because of this - Fear that there's no way out, fear that I will have to endure all the cosmos ever has in it. Sometimes we crave oblivion, we want rest, we want peace, we want off this spinning sphere for a while. And in those moments of fear I remember the void, the pregnant peace, the infinite expanse of nothing, the utter lack of anything and somehow the foundation of everything. If we can know the void, then we can know peace.
Having taken all of this into the core of myself, I don't smoke extract anymore. I feel it would be greedy somehow for myself. And yet I do feel the call of Salvia. I long for that feeling of the void, for that emptying of the mind and the ability to instantaneously
"know". These days I still use the plant, but I exclusively use Siebert's tincture, generally opting for the high end of the "Strong" dose (but not yet a "Very Strong" dose). I use the tincture while I continue to try to hunt down a plant. I would most love to work with the leaves but have so far not found a plant, and unfortunately my lifestyle sees me out of town so often I may have to frequently get plant-sitters during my at-times very long trips away. As for tincture, I have so far not broken through using this method, but it brings me into that familiar world beyond my body, the churning machine of energy that surrounds us and reminds us that we aren't our meat and bones, we aren't our brain or heart, and the world as we see it is a kind of smoke-and-mirror show. I come out of these trips with a glow of love for all life, even life corrupted and turned monster. There is darkness in potential too - That's the price we pay for diversity, for color, for the ability to take part in the wild game and be free to choose our path along the way.
And the most important choice is the choice we discover of perspective - That we can CHOOSE how we see each other and the world, we can CHOOSE what we believe is important and what matters. There is a place where nothing matters, and in that place all potential realities can be held in a pixel. We are not in that place, though Salvia can give us a glimpse. We are in the middle world, the jungle, the swamp, the realms of eating and fucking. It's utterly ridiculous, this place. I can't help but love it.
