The Gate Within

 

                                                                                  By Jo P and Sally D

 

 

19 September 2003

 

It’s 2 AM and everyone else is asleep. Basically, I want to test a batch of my homemade 10 x, made by evaporating tincture from nine leaves onto a single leaf. I’ve had enough of super-hot smoke from regular leaf with a torch lighter. This time I’ll use a regular lighter for a change.

 

With a generous pinch of 10 x in my water pipe and “Infinite Shore” (by Steve Roach) playing on the stereo, I savor the first inhalation. As expected, there’s little smoke, so it’s a lot more comfortable. When I exhale 30 seconds later, I’m wondering if the extract’s strong enough. I take in the leftover smoke from the pipe’s spacious chamber. That’s more like it—wings are growing from out of my chest.

 

Then the Big Crunch into Salvia Space: the entire living room—sofa, armchair, coffee table—and I melt like liquefied metal onto the carpet. Holy fuck!

 

Now the carpet reveals its strange “innermost essence”: it takes on the appearance of a steel gate that formed part of the outer wall surrounding my childhood home (which I haven’t seen in fourteen years). How’s that for cleansing the doors of perception?

 

The most disturbing part of the transformation (indeed, of all my Salvia “liquefaction” trips) is not knowing what I—that is, my body and ego—have become. In this case, I (my “spirit”, or what’s left after body and ego have been stripped away) never figure out exactly which part of the gate I (the phenomenal I) have melted into. Fortunately, since the ego is so nicely hammered, there’s very little damned ego left to do the worrying.

 

Also, smoked Salvia is graciously brief. After about five minutes, the vision breaks. Astonished, I watch the living room and I “congeal” back into ordinary reality.

 

I haven’t thought about that gate since I was a kid. The memory leads to another, then another…. I relive some long-lost childhood experiences from the days when we (my parents, siblings, and I) were still living together under one roof. Those moments were never really gone. Just as each instant of the past affects the present, so does every one of those moments shape—and still live in—the landscape of my being.

 

Only a fool believes that water dies when a drop of water disappears.