Leary wrote something based on the "eight-circuit model of consciousness" that seemed, when I read it the first time, to be very relevant to understanding the Salvia experience, and you just called it right to my mind. For all of our entertainment and edification I'd like to share a highly-abridged excerpt, meant to illuminate chiefly the points I consider salient to your concerns re: gross falling feeling.
quote:
1. The Bio-Survival Circuit ("We are Safe") is concerned with safety in a marine environment. ...
2. The Emotion-Locomotion Circuit is concerned with territorial security. ...
3. The Mental-Manipulative Circuit ("We are Right") is concerned with dexterity ,language, and the manufacture of artifacts. ...
4. The Sexual-Social Circuit ("We are Good") is concerned with domestication, parenthood, and child-rearing social roles. ...
The first 4 imprints are concerned with mastery of terrestrial turf and insectoid security. The 4 post-survival imprints and conditioned networks involve the fabrication of post-terrestrial realities. ...
5. The Neurosomatic Rapture Circuit ("We are Beautiful") mediates body-time experience -- sensory and somatic...
Here we face the paradox and terror of time-consciousness. Activating the "silent hemisphere" creates a Hedonic Boom that momentarily shatters all previously imprinted and learned values. Consciousness seems to invade all the forbidden and dangerous "below," "behind," "wrong," "cross-sexual" areas. Circuit 1 screams, "Danger! Red alert!" Circuit 2 shouts, "Watch out! You're helpless!" Circuit 3 warns, "Beware! You're in error!" Circuit 4 whispers, "Irresponsible! Violation of sex role."
The instinctive terrors mastered by skydivers and circus performers are nothing compared to the momentary panic of a nervous system transcending its four lifelong, life-preserving circuits.
What seems relevant to me is the reference to security -- Salvia debases us completely, scrambles all mental circuits so their output becomes alien nonsense, and suddenly we don't know if we've been flipped upside down, if we're trespassing or being trespassed on, if we are safe or right or good. We may determine immediately by the upsettingly strange state of our internal alarms that we are in grave danger, and that everything is very wrong and bad to boot. I definitely associate such feelings with the Salvia experience -- it's why I said all this just now.
Why I bothered, the practical upshot of all this, is this: perhaps through deciding that -all- the deeply-upsetting feelings Salvia can induce, even the ones that seem very basic and private and primary and intuitive and important, the most unequivocal "keep-away"'s, are not actually a result of evaluation of and emotional reaction to your true circumstances at the moment: they're the background noise of your biological alarms going haywire. So, ignore it, treat it like loud strange music and glory in every instant of total dread as if it were a horrible roller coaster.
That's my advice, and how I plan to face the plant these days if I ever, ever smoke it again
If what I just quoted gave me one new way of looking at the salvia
experience -- and it did -- it's the image of smoker as a bug flipped
over on its back, kicking its legs in panic -- instead of listening to what's being said by the hyper-dimensional spirit-aliens all around him.
I think Salvia might appreciate the approach of glum surrender to
totally helpless upset... more so, I imagine, than the boilerplate
psychonaut angles I've tried to come at "her" with before.Might be interesting to note that I've never felt that anything was ugly on Salvia (circuit five's concern is listed as "we are beautiful"). If the eight-circuit model is at all empirically accurate, then this could mean that Salvia only hopelessly upsets the four "survival" circuits, leaving circuits five through eight undistorted -- could they even be, ye, sharpened or enhanced by turning one's attention away from the lower four circuits which have become noise -- thus opening the door to extreme visionary/revelatory/creative/religious experiences, but only for the folks who know how to calm down? Or what?!
Way weirder than DXM... though that's shown me some very funny pictures
