Salvia: What is it and is it dangerous?

Given the growing concerns developing around legal highs and the like these days, I think it’s important for people to get the facts straight. Salvia Divinorum, also known as Diviner’s Sage, is a plant belonging to the Salvia genus, closely related to Sage, which contains the psychoactive substance, Salvinorin A, responsible for the plant’s dissociative hallucinogenic effects. Salvinorin A has been shown to be active at doses as low as 200 µg, making it more potent than any other naturally occurring hallucinogen, although this should not be confused with toxicity as Salvinorin A has not been shown to cause any tissue or organ damage to the human body in any consumable amount. Generally speaking, when smoked, the Salvia trip lasts anywhere from 3-15 minutes, and when orally ingested it lasts from 30-90 minutes, but is much milder. In addition, Salvia has been shown to have no addictive qualities to it, and in contrast has been shown to be useful in treating Severe Depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Drug Addictions and many other disorders, as well. And yet, many states across the country have either banned the substance completely or are pushing to do so. Below is a link to a site that I would recommend anyone seeking further scientific knowledge on Salvia to click, and a quote from it expressing an opinion which I couldn’t agree with more.

“Scheduling is intended for substances that have a high potential for abuse, a lack of accepted safety, and no currently accepted medical use. Scientifically speaking, Salvia divinorum does not meet any of these criteria and is an excellent candidate for regulation rather than criminalization.” Salviatruth.com

The Magic Is Gone…

The magic is gone. The words no longer form… meaningless ink blots more shallow than ever. Almost without personality, if not for their personality to be molded by apathy. Each drag seems to put something in, and in turn, take something of equal or greater value out. As if there’s an underground trade taking place inside of me. A certain form of hibernation, only waiting for the cruel taste of madness and blank vision, black and red empty pain piercing through so decadently. A rose thou art sick, full and bloated gushing upset outbursts. Morbid drippings leaking, seeping, approaching… setting in like decapitated flies marching to the beating heart, looking for refuge. As once flowing through a river, foul and rotten carcasses like those of our ancestors, feeding and bathing and loathing existence, or merely indifferent, just floating and drifting as interval time claims their minds. I think I ought to visit the Chelsea Hotel, home of those on the road, those with too much junk, those with poison lacking stability and brutal, vicious murder. Something tells me I’ll fit right in.

Pornographic Iconoclasm Release Date: 01/23/11

All is in the title. After much writing, editing, and procrastination, I’m finally setting a release date for the PDF version of this bad boy. Of course, more will be posted in the upcoming days.

The Second Phase: Going Up

The Second Phase: Going Up

“So you think you know where madness lies?”

My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, “Yes.”

Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure… Roses : The flowers are easy to paint, The leaves difficult. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. By means of such devices as recorders, clock-controlled switches, public address systems and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact.

“And you couldn’t control it?”

We re-entered the house. A meal had been prepared. A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision.

“Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would you not be able to hold it?”

This bank of red and white geraniums, for example-it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots -all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics – chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates… revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot… decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms… should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote.

Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

“And I ask my lovers do you know where the desert roses bloom and grow?” Perhaps a few of the lost souls might in this way be helped to win some measure of control over the universe – at once beautiful and appalling, but always other than human, always totally incomprehensible – in which they find themselves condemned to live. None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair.

We walked out into the street. A large pale blue automobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. The flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove.

Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose. And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard. The Red Sea of traffic parted at last, and we crossed into another oasis of trees and lawns and roses. As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering… The transition from a regular pattern of the solution manifold of a dynamical system to regimes of chaotic motion, as a function of control parameters, can happen in various ways.

“…Their intention is both totality and differentiation.” This bank of red and white geraniums, for example-it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. But the “is-ness” of both was the same, the eternal quality of their transience was the same.

The dynamical system exhibits chaotic behavior if and only if the leading Liapunov exponent is positive.

What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.

I’m ripping my hairs out by this point, dropping them one strand at a time, they flutter to the ground. My jaw is clenched, teeth are grinding and clicking in anxiousness. My nails have been chewed past the fingertips and then some. Blood trickles down my arms from the open flesh. My bones begin to itch from the inside. Shivering as if cold or tired, but neither. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
—–
Source(s): The Doors Of Perception by Aldous Huxley, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Slur by Coil, Mechanics From Newton’s Laws To Deterministic Chaos

The First Phase: Conspiracy and Misconception

Here is the first part, or phase, to a series of cut-ups taken from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception. Enjoy.
—–
The First Phase: Conspiracy and Misconception

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories.

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain’s normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.

It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts.

Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness.

“What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books.

The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris.

“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked.

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplatives was being renewed – renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms – as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations…

But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and practical compassion?

Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no form of contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The Lord’s Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation.

“Cheap,” I commented. “Trivial. Like things in a five-and-ten.” And all this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe. “It’s as though one were below decks in a ship,” I said. “A five-and-ten-cent ship.” And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions, with the portrait of Cezanne, with A.B. among the Dolomites overacting his favorite character in fiction. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self…

The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable.

“These voices,” I said appreciatively, “these voices – they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.” And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. “And yet,” I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-Reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, “and yet it does not matter that he’s all in bits.

But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded rather funny. Dredged up from the personal subconscious, agony succeeded twelve-tone agony… When it was over, the investigator suggested a walk in the garden. I was willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind – or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organism -I found myself able to get up, open the French window and walk out with only a minimum of hesitation. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. The drug brings hell and purgatory…

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia …only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain.

“If you started in the wrong way,” I said in answer to the investigator’s questions, “everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating, You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.”
—–
Source(s): Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception

Taking a short break from this…

This isn’t really necessary, but I figured I’d let you guys know, I’m going to be taking a short break from posting on here for awhile, and writing too for a little while. I’m a little bit burnt out right now so I’m probably just going to stop for a few days, but might not post again for as long as a week. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve fallen behind this blog, and it has gotten to the point where I am posting things literally as I write them, which has led to me feeling a weird kind of pressure both towards my writing and how often I do it. So this is not to say I’m done writing for now, it is just to say that I’ll be back in about a week give or take with some new stuff, including probably a few cut-ups and some other stuff.

Update On Upcoming Novella – Pornographic Iconoclasm

I’m just posting this as an update to you all regarding my novella I’ve been editing for weeks now. It’s almost done, though there are still some typos and there is a little bit of (unintentionally) poor grammar that needs to be cleaned up, so it might still be a little while. I’m also juggling around a few sections which may or may not make it into the released version. With that said, though, I have nearly come to a conclusion on the title. I’m thinking of going with Pornographic Iconoclasm, so long as it sticks. For now, just think of it as a working title. Oh, and here’s the introduction to the book, just to give you all a taste of what’s to come:

Flush red. Door slams trailing a shadow behind it; hiding the light of the world, from the world. Shadows foreshadowing darkness; unspeakable acts. Throbbing. Mirror gazes a blank stare at the wall. A peculiar obsession. I take my seat, on my throne, directly to the side of it, witnessing peripheral reflections. Almost as if I do not want to see, but my curiosity trumps my self-control any day. Some things are better left alone, but I cannot help it. Eyes readjusting. The incandescent glow of my black box of secrets and its flashing images of virtue unfolds throughout the catacombs of the mind—my mind. Linking conscience to myself, like a current of electricity.

The glass is half empty. More than half empty—and that’s counting the damn spoon just sitting there in it, allowing for liquid displacement to deceitfully claim more of the glass than what is rightfully so. One might do well keeping in mind that equilibrium is not determined by volume alone.

Legs are pumping, up and down. Up and down, up and down, up and down. This machine is getting ready. Then… piss. Losing steam. Please, please me black box. And feed me half empty cup.

Stir, stir, stir, then gulp. Flush red again. An array of naked vessel images appear upon the screen. Some clothes, pinks and blacks, but mostly just the colors of bare skin. Their ports are ready for the interactions of the flesh. More throbbing, and purple instead of red.

“What do girls usually do?” Inquires the blond wearing nothing but a pastel pink long-sleeve shirt and some hot pink panties.

The brunette grins, “You’ll see. Trust me,” as she begins to remove the blond’s panties.

The blond closes her legs, placing a hand to cover her entry ports.“This is so weird.”

The brunette makes a convincing argument, “No it’s not; it’s not weird.”

“Okay.”

Meanwhile, the machine is really starting to get his rocks off. I don’t know how much more I can take.

“But I’m nervous,” the blond admits.

“It’s okay. We’re all girls here; we have the same parts.” Aww, how comforting.

“Can you taste it?”

“You taste delicious.”

Pause. Blackout. Pressure released. Fading, fading, fading further. Coming down. Crashing. All at once. So unclean, the after effects feel. So filthy. Scum. I’ve sunk so low. So fucking low, and now shrinking. Smaller and smaller and now horrendously insignificant. Need to cover up. Need to shower and get dressed. Need to forget. Need to make sure this glass is empty. Gulp.

To the Vultures

To the vultures:

Sweeping past and through and among the decay
and by the by, feasting upon the warped flesh
darker-shaded spectrum hues and virtue
their very own virtue of survival.

Burrowing; finding their way as parasitic inhabitants
conforming to acknowledge and embrace death
picking away at the outer membrane of our very existence
never wasting, never reproached; keeping us in check.

Stranded in desolation hills and deserts; deserted
music of dust blowing, passing by as chaos; random
happens left to chance chiming in for what is to come
guided by nightmares and dreams, our own reality strikes a final chord.

The Sale Of Men (The Salesman Cut-Up)

Some guy’s trying to push his poppies down our throats but we all got shrunken heads and shrunken necks and he thinks he can get us to shove them down, but what happens when we gag and spurt? This salesman has got the market cornered and they just go along with it trying to hold their heads up, meanwhile… These are cases of… of no shame or pride. So, the Salesman drops by from time to time, keeping his slaves in order; needs to keep a public image. Strokes up and down, up and down… The other junkies’ new heads are looking fine, working fine, hardly, overactive. The sting brought upon by this man’s technique intrigues me, but the other junkies, all degenerates, know nothing of feeling, and they rather like it that way. Somehow inescapable, the pains of deterred flesh are profound.

Self-execution.

A feigned expression of something, some sort of feeling or minimalistic acknowledgment directs its way back to me. It’s really quite sad to see them all like this; mindless standing in lines forming a grid network of void cells. That’s all they really are, anymore. Just void cells waiting for their ‘on’s and ‘off’s, one by one.

“I said ‘sorry’, for bumping into you.” More of that nothing, something, gotta be something, but what? A brief moment passes, and then back to formation.

Nothing. Silence.

Salesman begins to teach them like flies. Greedy fucking Salesman took not only their mouths, but their eyes, their ears and even their nose. Big and clunky new heads, only good for feeling. Good for feeling alive; alive and frail, guided through monotonous streams of binary sensation, and fucking useless. Learned and repeated motor activity patterns are rewarded with junk, constantly. I can see them marching in lines. They feel no pain. They feel so alive, but they feel no pain. They could not be further from the truth. Only consequence, if you can call it that, is now they’re all original; finally got a reason to feel special.

“Why does he wait so long to give us what we want?”
“Yeah,” they demanded in chorus.
Our Salesman is at it again. He’s figuring out this whole marketing thing real quick. Now he’s promised them bigger heads, and they don’t like what they got no more.

“I said ‘sorry’, dammit! I know you can’t talk, but you can at least acknowledge me.”

I know exactly what I’m doing, and, honestly… I quite enjoy it. I chose this. It’s not like they chose this. I chose this. And just when everyone has given up hope, just as the Salesman has established his control and exerted it upon all others, he forgets the most important detail of all.

Still nothing. The grid of ‘on’ ‘off’ers continued it’s business. Junk pulsed throughout the rows and rows. The flickering beacons of their junk-heads was magnificent. The gray matter around us began to glow. The hollow husks of the once barely living illuminated. Still no color formed, but at least there was light.

Are you kidding me? I haven’t felt so alive since… Well, since I got my last fix…

“You know what to do with this.”
“Of course.”
One makes a move; sticks his neck out. We all stick our necks out. It’s autonomous. The words, ‘We are one, we are all’ echo. We are finally beginning to come around. All our void cells, now filling with nothing but regret. Disconnect. Disconnect and disengage, and sever the wires. It’s never been done before? It’s all we ever do… until the edge of our societal bubble is reached, and the ego becomes collective and begins to fold in on itself. Like a Republican: he’s found a way to live among us through his parasitic ways… he just kept taking more for himself. Well now the supply is running out.

A suggestion: we sell ourselves short. It’s all we ever do. All just pawns. The Salesman is just a pawn with an ego.

Our Salesman is keeping the last of what’s left for himself… taking advantage of all the common folk. Just another void cell, hopeless, filled with regret, considering his options, his past, what he has done and what he has not. He has no one to talk to, and so he reflects. The Salesman has, perhaps, one weakness… All the junkies come scrawling to listen in.

Belated Happy New Years

Hope everyone had a Happy New Year’s Eve. Perhaps, you were all out partying as I was. If so, right on! If not, then I hope you enjoyed whatever it was you were doing. Here’s to an even more eventful 2011!