Within around thirty seconds of smoking the dark herbal extract the effects rapidly began, and I felt my entire sense of identity suddenly shift. I was instantly transformed from a human being into a tiny disembodied speck of consciousness — completely bewildered as to what I was and amnesic of my former identity. I was suspended in a hyperspatial dimension, a crystalline network of pulsing energies, that was filled with countless other miniature beings like me. I found myself inside of a kind of space within space, that appeared to transcend the whole three-dimensional universe. Suddenly, my identity shifted again, as a portion of the space and beings around me folded and twisted into me, becoming a part of me. More and more layers of the space around me continued folding in and becoming a part of my expanding sense of identity — until, finally, I was my familiar human self again. This strange and somewhat unsettling experience was the result of my smoking an extract made from the hallucinogenic leaves of the Salvia divinorum plant.

Although the Latin name for the Mexican sage Salvia divinorum literally translates as “sage of the seers,” this powerful hallucinogenic plant goes by a number of other names, such as Shka Pastora (”Leaves of the Shepherdess”), Diviner’s Sage, ska María Pastora, yerba de Maria, Magic Mint, Sally-D, and salvia. Until fairly recently, this innocent-looking member of the mint family — whose hallucinogenic powers can dwarf those of magic mushrooms and LSD — was virtually unknown outside of a small region of Central Mexico, where it has been used as a shamanic healing tool by the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca for at least hundreds of years. The Mazatec shamans use salvia to facilitate divinatory or visionary states of consciousness during their spiritual healing sessions when psilocybin mushrooms aren’t in season. According to ethnobotanist Daniel Siebert, “The Mazatec shamans primarily take it ceremonially as a tool for gaining access to the supernatural world or what they believe to be the realm of divine beings and supernatural entities.” …

[read more at Reality Sandwich]