Before I took salvia divinorum, and after I took salvia divinorum. Before I took salvia divinorum, I had a pretty concrete idea of myself. Sure I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do, or what my ultimate purpose was, but I had a pretty good idea that I was cacophony and that I existed on the planet Earth. I had a decent job in a startup company and made more money than could be expected for someone without a college degree. I was still a failure, but not the catastrophic, absolute one that I am today.
After salvia divinorum, I lost all faith in reality and even in the existence of my own personality. I began to view reality as something mysterious, something “true,” underlying the mere appearance of things. Sometimes I thought of it as a complex illusion, lights dancing on a screen sensitive to its reception, perceived by extremely limited senses and fit together by a faulty organic computer into something comprehensible. Other times I thought of it as a prison — my defining argument for this was, why should beings exist that are permanently traumatized by suffering but relatively unaffected by joy?
Salvia divinorum, for the sensitive, is an extremely devastating experience. One of the world’s most powerful hallucinogens, it was originally used by Oaxacan tribal shamans in Mexico to commune with the spirits. The sensations it creates are difficult to describe, but it’s like being sucked from this dimension into one where you don’t really “fit,” where all your perceptions of space and time are no longer adequate to interpret the existence you find yourself in. The simplest way I could describe this is like “flowing upward into a world of angles.” I remember seeing lots of colors and geometric patterns, feeling a disturbing sense of motion, and experiencing an overwhelming feeling that I had always existed in this reality outside of time, and that I always would. Now I sometimes wonder if, when I die, I will return to a dimension like the one I experienced under salvia.
The experience was so powerful I began to doubt this reality. Perhaps there are other realities, underlying or adjacent to this one, which require an altered mode of consciousness to witness but are equally valid interpretations of existence? I began to wonder if insanity was merely an alternate method of perceiving reality, and speculated on the possibility that one day reality itself might “go insane,” and if it did, how would I tell the difference? It was shortly after this that I developed a fascination with the consciousness-bending tales of Philip K. Dick, and I experimented with the I Ching and other hallucinogens like LSD and mushrooms. The full onset of mental illness was quick to follow.
I can’t help but wonder if this salvia wasn’t the initial trigger for something — LSD has been known to induce psychosis in test subjects, but I am uncertain if it causes permanent psychosis, that is, psychosis that lasts once the drug is out of one’s system. I know LSD and other hallucinogens were the focus of MKULTRA mind control programs in the 70’s, the goal of which I believe was to create an “insane lone gunman” that could be used for assassinations. Could it be that the experiments were successful? Sometimes I wonder. I also used to wonder if the drugs I was prescribed to treat depression (particularly Effexor, which induced in me a form of mania) weren’t also part of a similar program. Maybe the combination of drugs, both legal and illegal, fried my brain?
My therapist tells me this isn’t the case, and that no drug can “make” a person mentally ill — they either are or aren’t. But I tend to think of it as a disposition to being mentally well or unwell, with drugs or stress as “triggers” that can push a person over the line. Much as certain people have an addictive personality, or a predeliction for alcohol that may or may not be succumbed to depending on that person’s circumstances. Perhaps I will never know the answer.