ZOOMDOUT Trip Report: The You
By: Sebastian Gallegos
Set: In the midst of launching my first business venture
Sex: Male
Substance: Salvia Divinorum from Salvia Zone (infinity-level extract)
Setting: Garage. Summer Night 2009
My overflowing dark, glow-in-the-dark blue bowl was brimming with the dark psychoactive matter. The matter at hand, of course, was Salvia Divinorum. As I diligently poured every potent Salvia particle into the royal blue glass bowl, I felt ceremoniously apprehensive as to what the answer to my question would be. The intention was a question. Fresh out of university with my bachelors in Entrepreneurship and Finance, I decided to launch my first business: ZOOMDOUT. I wanted to know if my nascent company was headed in the correct direction. Was the ZOOMDOUT mission statement and value proposition too far outside of the scope of this world? Did a market for this type of thing exist? Was it too niche? Too fringe? Could we, the psychedelicos of this world, organize and collectively attempt to English these unenglishable experiences? I was about to be presented with an answer.
I enter into the vaguely familiar shape-shifting Salvia world with these questions clamped down into my hands. Quickly the questions begin to dematerialize. At about the 60-second mark I exhale and nonchalantly struggle to look for the ember-lit glass pipe. I barely manage to grab hold of the instrument, and at this time the mere act of taking another inhalation of the misty, psychedelic smoke began to look phenomenally impossible. But in the back of my mind I know I’m supposed to stick to the plan at hand and proceed to take at least a second toke of the potent Salvia smoke and hold it for about another minute. Taking the second hit I’m beyond even the concept of “gone.” Of course, I’m no longer in my garage. In fact, I discover that I’m in the middle of space. I take a moment to analyze my cosmic surroundings, acknowledging the fact that I’m probably dead at this point, “but it’s okay,” I think to myself. There’s such a dramatic disconnect from my body. But “I” am here. I realize that I am possibly floating in an ordinary, cosmographical point in space. I accept it and continue to look around in wonder and befuddlement.
My surroundings appear to be brimming with an animated intelligence. The stars seem to be laughingly twinkling at me with an air of knowingness. The bizarrely usual when it comes to Salvia consciousness. A few long, non-standard seconds pass by when an extremely peculiar possibility hit me: I’ve been gazing into a cosmic mind made up of stars, expanded to the size larger than a galaxy, or more. Completely “spaced out,” I was overwhelmed with an existential shock of consciousness. What was I looking at? Why was I looking at this? I’m not even ready for this…
I relaxed a bit and began to zoom out my perspective in order to get a more encompassing view of this mysterious, star-lit mind. Yes, definitely a mind, but whose mind was this? As I zoomed out I began to get a glimpse of a more complete picture. The zoom out lasted for quite some time until I began to realize this mind was actually inside of a giant, translucent human head. An intense emotion of déjà vu overtook me at this point. I realized that the gently-glowing facial features of this universe-sized head were overbearingly familiar to me. Why would that be? Where could I have possibly seen this giant Head before?
The more I zoom out, the more of the face I begin to see. As my hyper-active mind struggles to put back the scattered cosmic puzzle-pieces together, the eerie feeling of déjà vu crescendos into an all-encompassing explosion of blasphemous notion. The translucent, Cosmic Head is gleaming at me outside the corner of his glinting cosmic eye, nodding his universal-sized head in some sort of omniscient approval. At this moment my eyes expand to the size of the Holland Tunnel and I recognize the Universe-sized Head as… myself.
The most proper metaphor for this precise experience is to imagine you’re playing one of those first-person video games where you’re controlling your character throughout the course of the game. Well, what happens? If you make a left your character goes left. If you hit the jump button, well, then your character jumps. But imagine, for a moment, that you’re taking your character down its video game path, and all of a sudden, your character suddenly stops in the middle of its tracks. The character pauses for a brief second and looks over their right shoulder. The video game character somehow sees you right through the television screen and realizes that you’re the one playing it. Imagine the confounding shock of an unconscious video game character at the moment they realize they are being played in a game, controlled by a super-conscious player in a higher, non-pixilated medium. That’s kind of what happened to me. I was slapped with the idea that I am a pixilated puppet.
I saw my Player. I saw The Sebastian. My Supersoul. My Higher-Self. It wasn’t until after this trip that I discovered this ancient notion has been around for thousands of years. In Sanskrit, the word for this cosmic player is Paramātmā. This is your puppet master. This is what I refer to as “The You.” Because just as The Sebastian exists, so does The Terence, The Clarence, The Sarah, The Richard, The Laura, The Jeremy, The Charles, The Lucy, The Mary, The Molly, The Mandy, The Sally, The Lisa. Etymologically, Paramātmā, breaks down into two Sanskrit root words: parama (highest, supreme) and atma (self, soul); roughly combining to translate into the “highest self” or “supereme soul.” On a psycho-linguistic level, those two word combinations are the closest at being able to describe the spectacular meeting I had with this star-glowing being. Immediately following this Salvia Trip I woke up back in my garage, overflowing with a mystical glow. I couldn’t believe what happened. I got the answer to my question in the form of an approving cosmic glance. And my simple pixilated mind couldn’t wish for more.
Sex: Male
Substance: Salvia Divinorum from Salvia Zone (infinity-level extract)
Setting: Garage. Summer Night 2009
My overflowing dark, glow-in-the-dark blue bowl was brimming with the dark psychoactive matter. The matter at hand, of course, was Salvia Divinorum. As I diligently poured every potent Salvia particle into the royal blue glass bowl, I felt ceremoniously apprehensive as to what the answer to my question would be. The intention was a question. Fresh out of university with my bachelors in Entrepreneurship and Finance, I decided to launch my first business: ZOOMDOUT. I wanted to know if my nascent company was headed in the correct direction. Was the ZOOMDOUT mission statement and value proposition too far outside of the scope of this world? Did a market for this type of thing exist? Was it too niche? Too fringe? Could we, the psychedelicos of this world, organize and collectively attempt to English these unenglishable experiences? I was about to be presented with an answer.
I enter into the vaguely familiar shape-shifting Salvia world with these questions clamped down into my hands. Quickly the questions begin to dematerialize. At about the 60-second mark I exhale and nonchalantly struggle to look for the ember-lit glass pipe. I barely manage to grab hold of the instrument, and at this time the mere act of taking another inhalation of the misty, psychedelic smoke began to look phenomenally impossible. But in the back of my mind I know I’m supposed to stick to the plan at hand and proceed to take at least a second toke of the potent Salvia smoke and hold it for about another minute. Taking the second hit I’m beyond even the concept of “gone.” Of course, I’m no longer in my garage. In fact, I discover that I’m in the middle of space. I take a moment to analyze my cosmic surroundings, acknowledging the fact that I’m probably dead at this point, “but it’s okay,” I think to myself. There’s such a dramatic disconnect from my body. But “I” am here. I realize that I am possibly floating in an ordinary, cosmographical point in space. I accept it and continue to look around in wonder and befuddlement.
My surroundings appear to be brimming with an animated intelligence. The stars seem to be laughingly twinkling at me with an air of knowingness. The bizarrely usual when it comes to Salvia consciousness. A few long, non-standard seconds pass by when an extremely peculiar possibility hit me: I’ve been gazing into a cosmic mind made up of stars, expanded to the size larger than a galaxy, or more. Completely “spaced out,” I was overwhelmed with an existential shock of consciousness. What was I looking at? Why was I looking at this? I’m not even ready for this…
I relaxed a bit and began to zoom out my perspective in order to get a more encompassing view of this mysterious, star-lit mind. Yes, definitely a mind, but whose mind was this? As I zoomed out I began to get a glimpse of a more complete picture. The zoom out lasted for quite some time until I began to realize this mind was actually inside of a giant, translucent human head. An intense emotion of déjà vu overtook me at this point. I realized that the gently-glowing facial features of this universe-sized head were overbearingly familiar to me. Why would that be? Where could I have possibly seen this giant Head before?
The more I zoom out, the more of the face I begin to see. As my hyper-active mind struggles to put back the scattered cosmic puzzle-pieces together, the eerie feeling of déjà vu crescendos into an all-encompassing explosion of blasphemous notion. The translucent, Cosmic Head is gleaming at me outside the corner of his glinting cosmic eye, nodding his universal-sized head in some sort of omniscient approval. At this moment my eyes expand to the size of the Holland Tunnel and I recognize the Universe-sized Head as… myself.
The most proper metaphor for this precise experience is to imagine you’re playing one of those first-person video games where you’re controlling your character throughout the course of the game. Well, what happens? If you make a left your character goes left. If you hit the jump button, well, then your character jumps. But imagine, for a moment, that you’re taking your character down its video game path, and all of a sudden, your character suddenly stops in the middle of its tracks. The character pauses for a brief second and looks over their right shoulder. The video game character somehow sees you right through the television screen and realizes that you’re the one playing it. Imagine the confounding shock of an unconscious video game character at the moment they realize they are being played in a game, controlled by a super-conscious player in a higher, non-pixilated medium. That’s kind of what happened to me. I was slapped with the idea that I am a pixilated puppet.
I saw my Player. I saw The Sebastian. My Supersoul. My Higher-Self. It wasn’t until after this trip that I discovered this ancient notion has been around for thousands of years. In Sanskrit, the word for this cosmic player is Paramātmā. This is your puppet master. This is what I refer to as “The You.” Because just as The Sebastian exists, so does The Terence, The Clarence, The Sarah, The Richard, The Laura, The Jeremy, The Charles, The Lucy, The Mary, The Molly, The Mandy, The Sally, The Lisa. Etymologically, Paramātmā, breaks down into two Sanskrit root words: parama (highest, supreme) and atma (self, soul); roughly combining to translate into the “highest self” or “supereme soul.” On a psycho-linguistic level, those two word combinations are the closest at being able to describe the spectacular meeting I had with this star-glowing being. Immediately following this Salvia Trip I woke up back in my garage, overflowing with a mystical glow. I couldn’t believe what happened. I got the answer to my question in the form of an approving cosmic glance. And my simple pixilated mind couldn’t wish for more.
