Thanks for the input! Perhaps once I've reached a point of deeper comfort and understanding with the process of "approach," I'll begin to boost with smoked leaf. I notice what you might call a frequency shift being one of the major differences between tincture and smoke. Salvia is music - it's rhythm. Relationship to time shifts; Moments become repetitive replays of sensory sampling until the entirety of your sensory input has been "processed" into some bewildering salviaic machinery. With tincture the rhythm is slow, groovy, each beat gives you time to react. With extract smoke, it grinds and pulses with a fevered engine that doesn't give a shit if you're following the plot or not.
While oral breakthroughs seem rare, I must believe they are at least possible. And from Seibert's literature:
Quote:"Very strong doses totally immerse one in a visionary world and can propel consciousness into the far reaches of transdimensional/transpersonal space. CAUTION! Be careful when using large doses. The effects last considerably longer than when this herb is smoked. An extended high-level Salvia divinorum experience is a serious undertaking."
Here's what's really exciting to me about the concept of breakthrough via tincture. Whenever I dose with the stuff, it feels like ME doing the work as much as the drug. You must not only be WILLING to take the full journey, but you must KNOW HOW to take the full journey. Tincture is more than just a rollercoaster ride, it engages your active mind in a more meaningful capacity. You must first learn how to go further before you can take the steps.
To think that I can approach the visionary states, the breakthrough realms, and understand every step of the journey going in - That your antennae for the other world could be so tuned - This would be the holy grail for me.
Which begs the question for any tincture-or-quid-users:
How do you manage the trip? In words, how would you translate your own experience during the "approach"?
I find there are a few aspects of the path that seem to demand some sort of perspective to be married in order to continue further.
- Contact and the ubiquitous "presence" of entities. Your left brain demands to know. Are they outside or within? Are they both? Are you merely hearing your own echoed subconscious thoughts and processing them as outside voices? Or has a window been opened to a true, flowing, conscious energy that permeates the cosmos? Get stuck on this and go nowhere. It's so amazing to be seemingly in close contact with alien beings that it can floor you before you can hope to swim with them. Acceptance is crucial.
- Soma. Your body must change and ultimately for breakthrough you must detach and let go of your somatic self. I would say that this is the hardest part of the journey and the aspect most likely to bring on fear for people. If the entities be true beings, then this chapter is where you invite Death into the room for a tour. I find one way to "see" the new feel of your changing body is dimensional - your physical sensations are being flattened, like a map, and printed on a 2D sheet, each moment of sensory change being a new "frame" along the printed ribbon, which itself is spooling along a spiral spun by the "salvia energy". As your body changes, the previous dictum still holds: Acceptance is crucial.
- Inhabiting the "Witness consciousness" pilot seat. Combined with somatic death, I think this is the source of breakthrough potential. It puts you squarely into the moment with no past or future to access. I believe the "pure moment" is the true nature of what we call ego dissolution. When you have "forgotten" what came before now, when you no longer have a concern for a concept called the "future" and you float simply "now" on the spectrum of change, your ego and linear self are essentially suspended.
- Salviaic "Atmos." What the hell is this pranic wilderness? People describe gears and vortexes and orbits. And they're damned right. It's like our subtle body becomes our gross body - We consciously inhabit an energy body which itself is highly sensitive to invisible outer forces. Huge moving spinning machinery which can be difficult to deal with - but I find that if you find a vortex-point, a spot in the middle of spinning forces, you can reach a quiet place and allow yourself to go "in" deeper (or "further out" as it were). I feel as though there is a dense atmosphere that you must somehow clear in order to reach the visionary state, which is contained in a more open cosmic space like a void.
There is one particular point of the smoked journey that I have yet to experience through tincture. And this is the seemingly-exponential "splitting" of the consciousness into a multiplicity of selves. When I broke through on smoked extract, only after I had become a billionfold bristling fractal of me's did I find myself somehow "arriving" on the other side. This could conceivably be terrifying on tincture, but perhaps at its speed you could always re-piece yourself together and back out into comfort.
Anyone have some knowledge that helps them contend with the strangeness and go "deeper" into the experience?