Could you all please define a Salvia Breakthrough in your own words. It seems from what I read, there is some grey area on what a BT really is. Is it when there is absolutely no contact w/ reality, all OBE? Or can it be less intense than this?

In my experience there is a very vivid transition. not sure how big the "grey area" is, but I have been "stuck" in a pre-breakthrough swamp many times. Sometimes it feels to me like having a breakthrough is almost a learned experience, depending upon how you interpret the sensations. One method for me, which is highly unpleasant and which I don't particularly like to go through, is a splitting/dividing of the self over and over and over, exponentially. Each piece splits and those pieces split and so on. If you can sustain this for long enough you will eventually become such a complex fractal-like multitude that you essentially forget who you were and what you were and you have successfully transformed into something else. It has to do with what you become aware of - the revelation: "I am not my body - I am not even my mind - I am only aware and observing. There is no physical self." I believe this has something to do with the nature of breakthrough.

Another is to feel for directions around your head and follow them. You pick up a very strong awareness of directions - forward-left, or behind-right, or even outward-inward, as if there are tunnels connected to your brain that expand like foam and allow you to go outward or inward.

Another experience I've had is the vortex gears - a circular swirling of my sense of somatic self. I feel that I am being moved around in this vortex, and that I can even move a bit out of it - at which point I come to understand that there is a multitude of vortexes, like gears, all spinning with each other. I've found peace from the violence of these things in between the spinning. I haven't had a breakthrough with these, but many have claimed that they were crushed or destroyed within these gears, and only then did they arise on the "other side" of a breakthrough.

JD Arthur explains a very peaceful, beautiful breakthrough that he undergoes on 5x extract. He sees a flower opening up, and it engulfs him - when he moves through the center, it transforms him somehow, and that moment of transition carries with it the memory-swap that's so crucial to the salvia breakthrough - Amnesia: you forget what you were in your current life; Anamnesia: You somehow remember this realm in which you now float.

The breakthrough tends to involve a full transformation into a clearly distinct "other" realm. It carries with it a powerful, primal deja-vu: "I've been here before... No, I've ALWAYS been here..."

You have seemingly died, and yet somehow, in this new moment, you are still "you" - a being aware of an experience.

For me, one of the most startling experiences is coming back FROM a breakthrough. A raging sea of consciousness. A storm of bristling cells. No will. No power. You are utterly and totally lost to the force of this thing and have absolutely no recourse but to let go and allow it to take you, to gradually reassemble your pieces into this old body of yours.

From my voyages within the Salvinorin Seas, a "complete breakthrough" is an experience whereby one is transplanted into another reality, which is only remotely understandable by normal earthly humanoid interpretation. In my Salvia Divinorum trips, I can either be existent within a bizarre high-energy environment, call it an "electric circus", or an OBE, which takes my awareness into an undulating force of sheets of raw current, folding-over, morphing and pulsing with The Cosmic Force. Much of this is dependent on how much I intake and what my mind-set was, just prior to lift-off.

There are two characteristics I use to define whether I have or haven't had a breakthrough experience with Lady Salvia. #1. Ego dissolution. If I cannot remember who or what I am... I have crossed into the other side. Concepts like, "Who am I?" and "What am I?" are meaningless in such a state. Awareness persists and the experience of self takes on a new variation of identity... a new kind of internal witness is born from the dramatic shift in consciousness, which is very, very difficult to describe from the vantage point of this material dream of reality.

Sometimes I find myself BEING inanimate objects. I can be aware of having existential parameters of being the floor or the ceiling of a room which I am unfamiliar with, yet KNOW has a power and meaning... a lesson being given (if I could only figure out what it all meant). Or I might exist as the texture of an object or the sound of some kind of electrical buzzing frequency or an oscillating droning tone. No thought or mental dialog exists in such a state of being.

#2. I have this profound idea which germinates in my mind, as it struggles to maintain thought process... "I've GOT to remember this!" Each time I enter this depth of saturation with Salvia, I discover the KEY to universal knowledge and some profound truth.

Sadly, it is relative to the Salvia Universe and it cannot be brought back to the "normal" state of mind, which we find in our daily lives. It is something essential to understanding the energies which create the myriad levels of the universe and all of the parallel dimensions of being.

It's like those lucid dreams one has, when one can actually fly. In the dreamscape, understanding that to have clear intent is enough. Think it and it becomes possible. Dreaming and traveling in the Salvia realms are not so dissimilar. There is a hidden knowledge which is revealed in these planes of existence.

I know I've had a breakthrough, when I return struggling to recall the message that the Spirit Teacher has gifted. While much of this unique knowledge is incomprehensible from this side of the looking glass, there are instincts which we develop and train through our imagination and contemplative efforts. This enables us to surrender more completely , when we next return to the Salvia Universe.

Frankly it's quite the same with DMT and Hyperspace. It's not necessarily an OBE... but it is certainly a shift in perception of reality and plane of being.

This. The strongest salvia experience I ever had was splitting into infinite reflections of myself, somewhat like being "shuffled" like a deck of cards, with my consciousness/observing self being equally divided into each self...! It IS highly unpleasant...

If you can't remember the trip... then you probably broke through.

It is as if gravity becomes so harsh that it starts to fold the dimensions in on itself. 3-D fold into 2-D, and 2-D will fold into 1-D and then.....

you break through...

1-D folds in on itself, and you are nothing. Stripped of anything, only a thought. But it takes an enormous amount of pressure to keep you this way, so you feel like you are squeezed into the nothingness. When you truly break through though, the pressure is suddenly relieved, if but for a moment. And you are free to wander the voids of incredulous land. The thing is, you are not allowed to bring the revelations back with you. They must stay with the green goddess as you cross the bridge of smoke back into our reality.

spaghettified.

There is the sense that you have been there before, once you're over "there" you are flooded with what can only be termed a "sensation" of REMEMBERING THE "POINT". A feeling of "oh, yeah, this again...!"... and yet the revelation only stays with you as long as you are over "there", as tigerstrike said...

it's really quite bizarre... a similar feeling is evoked by freebased DMT, despite the fact that the content of the experiences are diametrically opposed... a feeling of "I have been here before...". However, I once said this to myself while over "there", to which Salvia responded by flinging me into endless terrifying thought loops and the "splitting" became SO much more ominous...

Another thing is that I find a striking similarity among S. divinorum reports... from the threshold "itching" or "pins-and-needles" to the breakthrough hall-of-mirrors-and-gearlike-constructs... when you talk to people who know, the similarity is downright eery. It's like everyone has the same trip. Or that there is only so much that can happen, and everyone gets a certain number of the attributes...

Like, splitting into infinite reflections of the self
what can only be described as the-deck-of-cardsification of reality (everything besides the self is split into infinitely repeating reflections)
more fanciful and phantastic infinitely repeating patterns.
( note that infinite repetition is the ubiquitous function)
A near-universal feeling of general discomfort, for me usually as the sensation (I would imagine) of having the epidermis removed all over my body.
A bizarre laughing fit (and 50% of the time, drooling fit), despite the fact that nothing at all is funny in the slightest.
A strong sense of paranoia, if others are present.
And a feeling of "I have been here before", or remembering the "point", but only for the duration of the breakthrough.

I have come to think of it as a practical joke played out in dimensional terms. There's a strong sense of "they're fucking with me!" ; my very first excursion into the land of the Salvia-giants, I forgot that I was on salvia and thought that everyone was playing some kind of joke on me...!

Oh, yeah, and maybe 20% of the people I have talked to have reported encounters with "giants", usually very old, and who want a good answer for why you are in their realm... I once "became" a giant standing knee-deep in a virtual ocean...

My experience with salvia has always been very positive.

A salvia breakthrough is very physical/dimensional: space itself begins to warp and fold, and I right along with it. A breakthrough often begins with me folding or stretching or flattening. Sometimes turning inside-out: a “blooming”. And when I’m fully turned inside-out, I’m on the “other side”. Some find the physical transformation unpleasant, but I find it fascinating.

I often get the sense that the salvia realm is very close – just a fraction of a millimeter away from us in another “parallel” space. It is tantalizingly close.

During this folding/blooming, there is often a rapid ego-dissolution. Salvia seems to act as an emotional “anesthetic” for me, so the loss of ego is never frightening or unpleasant.

Sometimes where I go is familiar – it feels as if I’m going home. Often there is knowledge, especially knowledge about the nature of space/dimensionality, that is very obvious at the time, but that fades upon return.

Almost every breakthrough involves profound amnesia. Not really ego-loss in the DMT sense, but more like ego-forgetting. Included in that forgetting is losing all memory that I had taken salvia. Forgetting who I am, what I am, having no memory of my past life as a human being.

For me, the salvia realm is often very familiar (unlike the very alien DMT realm). The “entities” are often people, and they speak with words, not telepathically. Often “people” in the salvia realm speak in a sing-song manner. There is often a strong child-like presence. The experience is very visual. Not strange, impossible to describe scenes as is common with DMT, but familiar scenes: “circus-like” places, manicured green grass, blue skies, white picket-fences, town squares.

Sometimes, many alternate realities reveal themselves like the pages of a 4-dimensional book – one stacked on top of the other, and each very thin, yet fully 3-dimensional. Moving “through the pages” is a fascinating experience.

Returning from a deep salvia breakthrough is also very special. There is a period of time where memories of a prior existence are not fully back. Piece by piece, the memories come back: “I’m a person. My name is Gibran. What day is it? What time is it? I took salvia. I have a life here on Earth…”

Amazing to read all of this. It almost sounds as if Salvia is a more intense experience than DMT. It's a bummer about the amnesia, but still a very nice quality. I think a big part of the human experience is not knowing everything, and just having to understand that this is the beauty of existence. Maybe this has something to do with why we can't bring back this ultimate knowledge from sage space.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed and will contribute to this thread. Keep em' coming. Peace & love to all of you!

This is very true of my experiences. I've always been a dreamer, from a young age, and was interesting in all things dreams well before I found Salvia. In the weeks that followed my first Salvia breakthrough, my lucid dreaming was intensified, I would sometimes have five or six distinct dreams that I could remember in the morning. Perhaps why I took to it so well, and have continued to use it for many other applications as well.

This is what really piques my interest, the fact that so many people experience the same things. I'm sure anyone who has had a few Salvia trips would come up with a very similar if not identical list like this one. And all these experiences that seem the same begs the question, is Salviaspace a real place? More than just some vivid hallucination?

I stole the term blooming from you, because it's so perfect a description

I had thought of it as being turned inside out, like a sock. That's exactly how it feels. And yes, it's not unpleasant, or perhaps it's an acquired sensation of sorts. The first time I remember it happening it was bizarre, but not entirely unpleasant.

To the OP, you can look at a Salvia breakthrough as being somewhat similar to a DMT breakthrough. Those that have experienced it, just know. Like some rite of passage, we're all initiates.

This. I have experienced EVERYTHING in this post on salvia.
The similarities are very strange.
The one thing I disagree with with is that most people seem to describe a folding IN while I experience a folding OUT.
For example if I am sitting on a couch, the place where the seat and back cushions meet (the place you always find loose change and the remote) will open and open and open until the couch is on the other side of the world and the salvia world comes out of the place the cushions met....kind of like if you lived on the closed pages of a book and then someone opened it like this.....V....and you fell into the middle.
Then when the experience is over it all folds back into the place it came from.

To define a breakthrough on salvia I would say it is like being trapped in another dimension with no awareness of your physical body or normal reality whatsoever.

Gibran2 blooming is a very accurate description of the way salvia comes on.
That seems very similar to what I was trying to say with the book and couch description.

I didn't realize there was so much in common between trips. It is remarkable that such precise motifs play themselves out for numerous people. I can also relate to some of these phenomena, albeit with a slightly altered perception. For instance, I once experienced a hall of doors similar to the "hall of mirrors." I am also familiar with the folding of dimensions; it's like I am being violently reshaped. It reminds me of a part from "A Wrinkle in Time." I haven't read the book since 4th grade, but I remember the protagonists transitioning to the 2nd dimension and the extreme discomfort caused.




I know this feeling, though I conceptualized it as my skin being bark.



The practical joke aspect, or, as another poster put it a while back, "the game" is a strange motif. For me it usually gets personal (patronizing), particularly at sub-breakthrough levels, although I guess any further than that and "personal" kind of loses meaning.



It could be shared psychic structures, archetypes if you will. Even with a change in details, that these experiences seem coherent in their overall form point to this. For instance, there's little structural difference between a hall of doors and a hall of mirrors. We may read philosophical differences into such details at what's in the hall, but they are motivically coherent, structured after some kind of recursive hall.

Fairies and elves. A cave and a uterus.

..yeah, very heavy 'recursion'..and a physical sense of being indistinguishable from the patterns..very,very old..singularity consciousness..
even terrifying dmt experiences seem warm and fuzzy in comparison...