Salvia: Trip 1
by: Joshua C. Collins

The nothingness behind closed eyes.  Compressed and stretched.  Pressed
downward as unseen forces pulled the edges of perception toward infinity. 
Like everything and nothing had somehow all merged to form the psychotic
smile of the invisible Cheshire cat.

Trip 2

And across the vastness that made the room, the table held two candles,
sitting equidistant from one another.  Suddenly a mirror divided the room,
the left half of the room completely obscured and replaced by the image of
the right.  My eyes traveled the room, eagerly meeting and dissecting each
object that feel under their gaze.  Ryan’s picture suddenly come to life,
the trees in it’s background danced and swayed.  Somehow I moved on,
perusing other odds and ends.  Instantly distracted, like a house cat
chasing a ray of light reflected off a watch face attached to busily
moving hands, then normal.

Trip 3

The nature of the trip was encased within the bass beat.  The percussion
became the driving force, the director of the scene.  I could see with
each beat, a depression, a dip as if I were visualizing the effect of
sound waves on my hear drum.  I the images changed became clearer, until I
saw what a rain must look like from the viewpoint of the pond.  Yet again
it changed.  The whole time the presence of gravity was all too
noticeable, as if I were made heavy by the intake of this drug.  So as the
bass beat on I was pressed down ward with each pulse.  I was the water in
a rainstorm.  Like always my transformation was short lived.  Within a
matter of minutes my perception had returned, my body had hungrily
metabolized the chemicals, and I sat as if nothing had happened.

[Untitled work #1]
by: Joshua C. Collins

It was too late for those dreams.
So I had them butchered and mutilated.
Then buried face down at a fork in the road.
This way, I knew, they could never come back.

Closed eye visions.  Altered perception.  The urge was to go with it, to
fall head long into the Rabbit hole, yet somehow there was an almost
tangible force holding me to reality.  I had calmed myself beforehand. 
Removing from my mind any possible tainting from fear or apprehension.  I
was well prepared for the journey, so by no conceivable means was it those
things that held me corporal.  No, it was as I have said, some previously
unrecorded 9th Law of Sir Isaac Newton or perhaps it was merely entropy,
an unwillingness of the mind to move from its comfortably lazy position,
cradled in the warm familiar bosom of normality.

Unable to sever my umbilicus I lay tethered to normal perception like a
dog on a short chain.  From time to time I would scramble fascinated and
enthralled at a fleeting vision only to be cruelly yanked back to the here
and now.  In limbo, neither able to completely surrender and drown behind
the images flooding my mind or completely deny their existence.  I sat
watching.

Time soon lost all meaning and relevance.  To live in a world free of the
bonds of time is joyous.  Conversations seem to span eons, suddenly
replaced by a walk on the beach.  Events juxtaposed upon one another.  Any
attempt to accurately or chronologically order the events of the day would
be impossible.   Mushrooms have that glorious affect of freeing you from
the synthetically constructed constraints of time.

I lay on the hotel bed, feeling that electric buzz throughout my frame. 
Occasionally I would open my eyes and stare in amazement at the bedspread,
it’s cheap hotel comforter with the usual pastel paisley swirls had come
alive.  Amused I would poke and pat at it, looking mad I’m sure, causing
ripples to dance across its surface as if it were merely oil on water.
I commented off and on, making sudden outbursts like I was in the grips of
religious fervor.  “That’s our problem, we managed to stand upright, and
have since only been looking up, never down were we came from!” I shouted.
 At the time pictures of man, living beast like, covered with dirt and
close to the earth had taken over my mind.  There we were, slouched over,
hairy and naked, one with the earth.  And through some process we stood
upright, walking, losing our body hair.  We became clean, and in most
cases developed phobias of dirt and germs.  We wore clothing, clean and
pressed, and we lived in tall buildings always stretching higher and
higher into the air.  We constructed time and religion, science and math. 
The ground was no longer our home.  Somehow our newfound abilities or
speech and our constructed realities had erased all need for Mother earth.
As a race we had become bratty teenagers, wanting our way, and
desperately trying to escape from Mother’s hold.

I found myself with wife and dog in tow, strolling down the windy beach,
under winter’s gray sky.  The ocean played a noisy rhythm on the shore.  I
closed my eyes, and was physically rocked by the percussion of breaking
waves.  The wind howled in my ears.  And yet through all the noise there
was a peaceful omnipresent hum just below the surface.  Perhaps that’s
where I was, somewhere just below the radar of everyday senses.  I
listened to the….  No, more accurately, I felt The Hum.  I felt it through
every fiber of my being, and in doing so I seemed to drift away from the
cold howling wind, biting my face and hands.

The Hum had, at least temporally, liberated me from the mundane.  I was
now somehow closer to being part of a greater consciousness, what Huxley
referred to as Mind at Large.  I was carried in The Hum’s wavelengths and
frequencies to Everywhere and Nowhere instantly.  I could feel the
resonance in my mind, and behind closed eyes my visions trembled like
stained glass windows on the verge of shattering.  I stared at the
vibrating glass watching as it flexed past the point of sound structural
integrity, yet it did not shatter.  This was not glass.  This thing, this
image I had, was my view of The Filter.

The Filter was, if you will, a mental sink trap, created to keep useless
crap from clogging the minds pipes.   Crap in this case being all
information that would in no way assist and in some cases hinder the
simple thought processes responsible for survival of any animal in a
hostile environment.  But now what need do we as humans have of these
primitive fight or flight responses in our artificially constructed
environments?  Where food is purchased and not hunted, and where predatory
concerns have been replaced with the traffic accidents, heart attacks and
cancer.

To tear down the walls of useless filters, built for a primate stumbling
along through a jungle, aware only of its need to feed, fuck, sleep and
survive.  Once free of our evolutionarily derived mental governor, we, as
a race, would find ourselves no longer living with an I-centric view of
the world around us.  Mind at Large would swallow us whole and there we
would find ourselves just a tiny, yet integrally involved, piece of an
ever-expanding, ever-changing world.  Our role in the past, present, and
future would become painfully clear.  No longer would it be necessary for 
poets and writers to toss around pregnant words with little meaning.

I spent the last part of my trip lying curled on the hotel bed.  My arms
wrapped tightly around my wife.  My head on her stomach, my eyes tightly
closed while countless images flooded my brain.  I talked to my daughter,
still held in the safe confines of her mother’s womb.  I don’t remember
what I said.  I remember a sense of closeness, oneness between all three
of us.  Maybe I didn’t talk, perhaps I only thought to her, trying to
reach out and touch the growing unspoiled consciousness within, a mind
that existed freely.

The remainder is a haze.  I had started my journey a mere 3 hours earlier,
yet I felt like I had been exploring for ages.  My perception of events
and time were still spotty, at some point I was driving, trying to decide
where to get dinner for my wife, sitting in a diner, scanning a menu and
yelling out my order, “Two number 5’s!”,  the waitress shuffling hurriedly
over, laughing nervously at my lack of protocol, a couple sitting across
the chrome plated room from us, glace around probably assuming I was
drunk.  Somehow I felt removed from these people, I saw them as sheep,
automatons, drones.  They gladly enacted pointless ritual, embracing
synthetic and destructive ways.

Within hours, my catalyst spent, I would yet again become blinded to Idea,
to Thought, or perhaps residue would remain minutely changing my
perception.

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