Fear and Loathing in Sally Space
Visions of a Cosmic Wheel hold Clues to the Nature of Mind and Reality
Looking back, it’s clear the grip of religious dogma on my mind would wilt away following my first psychedelic experience. It wasn’t until years later that I could appreciate the importance of that day. It was dangerous to let go of something that was so thoroughly interwoven with my identity without having a back-up ready to fill the void it left behind. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that reality would suddenly be up for grabs, and that the universal vaccum created by the removal of a divine hand would demand an adequate substitute from me. It was a risk, but it held the possibility of an invaluable payoff. Perhaps, the only payoff I could’ve ever wanted. The ultimate prize for letting it all go. I glimpsed it, felt it, understood it. For only $4.99, I ingested LSA, a chemical cousin of LSD, with a larger-than-recommended dose of pulverized morning glory seeds and documented the experience in a notebook.
The experience was many things, but a few things stand out to me still, years later. At the peak of the trip, I looked in the mirror. It was a rookie mistake. It was alarming. I was seeing…me…this person who’s been carrying around this body and this face, but my identification with it seemed flimsy, and trivial. I was looking at me, but it wasn’t really me, it was like a costume I had been wearing. The real me was something else… I took out the notebook and spontaneously began to scribble. With my pen I drew small loops in a circular pattern, creating a circle made out of smaller loops. Then I drew the same pattern within it, then again within that one, over and over again down into the center. When I reached the center of the pattern, it triggered what I can only describe as ecstasy. I drew an emphatic arrow pointing to the center and scrawled, “There I am!” I am right at the center, that’s me! I am here! It felt more true than anything I had ever heard or said. I am not this body, I am not my memories or my perceptions, I cannot be confined or defined in any way other than this: I am the center of a spiral, circular…thing.
Throughout my subsequent adventures into irregular states of mind, I have repeatedly found myself returning to the symbol of the circle. LSD showed me circular, spiral shapes spinning on the floor, in the walls, anywhere I looked. With my eyes closed, psilocybin revealed large spinning, circular objects and inspired a cyclical insight into reality itself, showing all of history to be nothing more than one aspect of a giant, cosmic pattern that rotates into itself.
I have yet to experience what is reportedly the most profound encounter with a psychedelic wheel, but everything I have read about it intrigues me greatly.
I first heard about it in high school. Kids were stumbling into smoke shops and buying what I now understand to be the most powerful naturally-occurring psychedelic substance on the planet. 2008 would be the last year that this was legally possible for most Americans. After YouTube videos showing the powerful effects of the substance went viral - featuring people falling through windows, crashing into furniture, laughing and screaming uncontrollably, etc. — followed up by a major exposee in the New York Times — most US states would ban it entirely.
It goes by many names.
The Mazatecs of Oaxaca call it Ska María Pastora (or the “Shepherdess”) and cultivate it for their rituals to this very day, believing it to be the physical incarnation of the Virgin Mary. R. Gordon Wasson, a banker-turned-botanist, was introduced to the plant by a priestess named Maria Sabina and called it salvia divinorum, Latin for “sage of the diviners”. Wasson and his team would escort samples back to US laboratories, and the chemists who extracted the active ingredient called it Salvinorin A. And the greasy-haired cashier who casually handed it to high-school kids, oblivious to the reverence and honor it received by Mazatecs who first cultivated it, called it Sally D. It was sold for the same price as a used Xbox game.
An extremely small dose of this substance, measured in micrograms, is guaranteed to flip your world upside down and turn it inside out. It has been described as one of the most disorienting experiences one can possibly have. Take the time to scour anonymous trip reports, and you’ll find descriptions of becoming a chair, a glass cup, or a shoe. Other times, the tripper becomes a different person in a different life, stuck in a different reality until the drug wears off and they return to a foggily-remembered past…before ingesting the plant merely 10 minutes ago. It is so confusing that some are left questioning if the reality they returned to is the same one they knew before, wondering if what they bought at the smoke shop was not a drug at all, but a one-way ticket to a different timeline. By far, the most intense experiences reported with this substance involve a confrontation with what has been dubbed the “Salvia Wheel”. It is not the aim of this article to comprehensively account for the Salvia experience. The sheer variety of possible experiences with this drug make that impossible. But Wheel encounters happen so consistently with this otherwise unpredictable drug that they demand a serious explanation.
One cannot understate anything about this Wheel. It is literally everything, all possible worlds and realities, all lifetimes, everything that has ever existed or will exist is caught in its massive rotation. It spans countless lifetimes, eons upon eons, an infinite chain of moments stretching back to the birth of the universe and until its very end…reducing the tripper to breathless terror and awe.
Intriguingly, while it is most often reported in experiences with salvia divinorum, it is not restricted to it. One ketamine report states “I was aware of a gigantic turning wheel of huge cosmic proportions, nothing existed apart from this wheel that I was attached to in some way…” A vision sparked by the combination of LSD with Nitrous Oxide reportedly revealed a “universal wheel” composed of all beings in the past, present, and future. Even a near-death experience describes, in vivid detail, an encounter with a cosmic wheel composed of all reality and all possible universes.
The frequency of Wheel encounters might be dismissed as sheer coincidence. Maybe so. If it weren’t for the fact that the very same symbol — with strikingly similar meanings and connotations — pervades mystical art and religious writings across the world, and used to depict the deepest spiritual truths, we might be tempted to write the Salvia Wheel off as yet another drug delusion. Both hardened materialists and deeply disturbed trippers tend to gravitate to this explanation.
It is the only way to preserve the integrity of the rational world. The reflex to dismiss these experiences as nothing more than empty hallucinations serves as a psychological defense mechanism. Those who subject themselves to the effects of psychedelics must always have the option to shrug it off no matter how cosmic and mind blowing their effects, since the alternative could demolish the foundation of their reality, leaving them psychologically adrift in a nonsensical universe. For them, these hallucinations cannot be anything other than delusions. So they don’t have much reason to dwell on the Wheel; they have no reason to suspect that it is important in some fundamental way. But if we let go of the materialist understanding of consciousness, and confront the fact that the rational world is not at all what it seems, we immediately find answers. We begin to sense that there is something very important about the Reality Wheel.
It is true, the reports of many psychedelic experiences seem to imply nothing more is going on than a simple hallucination; as they involve nothing more than distortions of color, shape, vibrancy, etc. But experiences like the Wheel are so much more. It shakes people to their core. It leaves them reeling, sometimes questioning reality for years after the encounter. It feels so real and so true that people come back convinced that this reality, the one we all seem to share, is an illusion and that the things they witnessed while tripping are the true reality.
That such a pregnant symbol - the Symbol of symbols - the great Mandala, the rotating “wheel of reality” spoken of in so many religions and conceptualized in so many philosophies, should appear at the peak of a Salvia trip…that the same cosmic intuition which enflamed the hearts of mystics all across the world, a truth which the esoteric masters of the East found only after a lifetime of meditation and which medieval ascetics only occasionally achieved through elaborate rituals and mortifications - the fundamentally cyclical nature of reality at every level - could also be found readily accessible at your corner head shop in a gaudy packet labeled with big, bubbly letters, PURPLE STICKY SALVIA - is absurd.
But it is absurd enough to be true. It bears all the hallmarks of profound revelation about the nature of reality, being so bizarre and alien - yet strangely familiar to a long forgotten state of mind - that we are forced to wonder how it’s even possible to be experienced by a human mind at all...be it a delusion or not. Like visionaries up and down the centuries, Salvia users speak of something so vast and intricate, yet so absolutely real, that language is useless to capture it.
All statements were true at once: I was a five-pointed wheel. Reality itself was the five-spoked wheel. It was actually not ‘flat’ in the way a wheel is flat. It had infinite depth, like each spoke of the wheel was a long shelf stretching out into the distance. It was kind of like a paddle wheel on a boat, only each of the five buckets was infinitely long and deep. I was actually a consciousness inside the tumbling object, rotating in its chambers while aware of all the chambers. They were full of light and beautifully riotous colors. As I tumbled in my colorful bucket, through an opening in my chamber I could sometimes see out into another world, the base or real reality…
“Reality is a 5-Spoked Wheel” -Vulpine
Claustrum Consciousness?
The unique weirdness of Salvia has been attributed to its disturbance of a very mysterious brain structure, the claustrum.
Latin for “closed” or “shut in”, the claustrum is enveloped by multiple brain structures, making it difficult to investigate in a living subject. So, we don’t know much about it, but that didn’t stop the famous scientist Francis Crick from theorizing. He asserts that it plays an integral role in consciousness itself. Its connectivity with many other brain regions, his theory goes, allows the claustrum to act as the central hub where sense, emotional and physiological impressions harmonize into one, unified experience. This is generally what we mean by consciousness : a unique, unified, subjective experience. Defending this hunch, Crick noted “it appears to be in an ideal position to integrate the most diverse kinds of information that underlie conscious perception, cognition and action.”
This theory was supported by a discovery just a few years ago, when EEG readings of the claustrum revealed that it was a generator of slow-wave brainwaves. This was quite the discovery. These waves are intimately and inseparably linked to all types of brain states, oscillating throughout the brain and all throughout the day, especially during sleep. In recent years, the results of these experiments have sparked a growing body of researchers to uncover more of its secrets. One promising avenue involves psychedelics.
Despite the perpetual mystery of what exactly psychedelics are doing to the brain, we can say some things with a high degree of certainty. We know that classical psychedelics like LSD and the “magic” in mushrooms - psilocybin - target roughly 50 receptors in the brain. Of those 50, we know that the most significant effects happen at the 5-HT2A receptor. This receptor is typically for the neurotransmitter called serotonin, frequently implicated in the feelings of love, joy, and intimacy. It is also peddled as the cure for meaninglessness, ennui, sadness and a cluster of negative emotions by a pharmaceutical industry that profits off this assumption year after year, but that’s for another time. When it comes to classical psychedelics, the brain is tricked into “accepting” them because they structurally resemble the serotonin neurotransmitter. Strangely, they fit better into the 5-HT2A receptor than serotonin itself (also a topic for a different time).
When they do, the ride begins, and there’s no getting off for hours.
There is another class of psychedelics, and this is the class Salvia belongs to. Dissociatives, which work differently. They are so different from the classical psychedelic experience that many have argued they shouldn’t even be called “psychedelic” at all. They’re not so heavy on the feelings of love and light, but more of a “why do I feel like a card-board cutout” or a descent-into-fits-of-terrified-laughter type of experience. Feelings of detachment from one’s self or the environment are common with dissociatives. There is often a sense of things being “unreal” or “dream-like”, that one is an inanimate object, or that one’s entire life leading up to the moments was nothing more than a dream and that now, in the wisps of smoke rising from the pipe, one beholds “true reality”.
This difference from classical psychedelics is often explained by the fact that dissociatives don’t target the 5-HT2A receptor at all. Instead, they affect other receptors, such as the kappa-opioid receptor, or KOR. There are only two naturally-occurring substances that target the KOR, the African psychedelic plant “ibogaine”, which is popularly used to cure various addictions and disorders. And the other is our obscure plant from Mexico: salvia divinorum. As if Salvinorin A wasn’t strange enough, it exclusively targets the KOR, making it the only known substance on the planet to do so.
Despite the differences between the classes of psychedelics, they share one thing in common. Out of the whole brain and nervous system, KORs are most densely packed in the claustrum. The 5-HT2A receptors are also widely distributed throughout the claustrum. So, logically, we might conclude that the claustrum is responsible for both types of psychedelic experience.
But this would be very inaccurate. After all, what exactly are Salvia and these other substances doing to the claustrum? Importantly, they inhibit brain operations. They turn the volume down, not up. This has been one of the most stunning effects of psychedelics. When neuroscientists first began studying their effects, they were expecting a brilliant light-show of neurons firing across the brain. But, in fact, the opposite was the truth; some of the most powerful psychedelic experiences corresponded with a reduction in brain activity, not an amplification of it. It appears the claustrum needs to be quieted for a psychedelic experience to be possible, which leads us in the opposite direction: it’s precisely not about the claustrum.
The fact that psychedelics diminish brain activity might not seem like a game-changing revelation, but it is. It not only suggests something very strange about how psychedelics work, but how the brain itself works.
Real’s Not Real
“Our ordinary sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we have been conned into playing” - Alan Watts
The ever-expanding catalog of opinions about the nature of consciousness has centered around one key question: what is it like to be something? What does it mean to have a sense of being a “me”? Or more exactly, what does it mean to have the conscious feeling of unique subjectivity? The debate rages on, but on nearly all sides of the argument one assumption is shared in common: whatever consciousness is, it is fundamentally a material process in the brain.
Given the evidence of the effects of psychedelics on the brain, this assumption has become questionable. These substances consistently and profoundly trigger a reduction in brain activity, both in the claustrum and elsewhere. Yet, paradoxically, the results are some of the most rich experiences human beings have ever described. How could someone’s subjective experience become more complex, detailed and rich with less brain activity? The fact that the most powerful psychedelic experiences are unanimously correlated with a global reduction in brain activity poses a strong counter-argument to the brain-generated view of consciousness.
If we use consciousness itself as the starting point, and treat the brain as more of a filter or manipulator instead of a generator of consciousness, then we bypass this issue entirely. We don’t have to dismiss this as merely brain activity gone haywire, or worse, that anyone who reports these experiences is lying. According to this other view, these experiences pose no problem at all. If conscious experience is more than just what happens in the brain, than it would make sense that when you quiet the brain, you begin to experience things that are ordinarily filtered out.
The “brain as filter” hypothesis is the crux of Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality, in which he uses evolutionary biology to argue, convincingly, that we perceive not just a watered-down version of reality, but none of reality at all. From the times of our ancient home in the sea, to the moment our brave ancestors left it for dry land, all across the history of biological organisms on this planet, each creature perceives only what is useful for survival, and nothing more. Hoffman thoroughly demonstrates that, just because it is useful for living organisms to perceive three dimensional space and to intuit a seamless flow of time, it doesn’t at all mean these things are objectively true. Animals which are adapted best to these assumptions tend to have a better chance of survival, and so pass these assumptions on to their offspring. That’s all the scientific evidence shows, and that’s all it can show, because science itself assumes that the very “laws” of reality to which we have adapted for survival are objectively real.
But, contrary to our intuitions, these laws are nothing more than statistical probabilities. Space-time doesn't even exist according to some of the most successful scientific models ever conceived. Recently, the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to scientists who demonstrated that the universe isn’t locally real, something that flies in the face of our intuitions. And it goes against our intuition for a very good reason. Because, despite being true, it doesn’t matter whatsoever to biological evolution, which optimizes for only survival and reproduction. In fact, Hoffman has demonstrated that a more “objective” view of reality is detrimental to survival and reproduction. The brain filters out true but useless information. Evolution does not favor objectivity, Hoffman claims, but utility.
He calls this the “fitness beats truth” theorem, claiming that ordinary human perception reveals a profoundly distorted version of reality, one that is “almost certainly wrong”. The fitness-beats-truth theorem “tells us that there is good reason to believe that the things that we perceive…don’t exist independent of our minds. The reason is that the structures of fitness payoffs, which shape what we perceive, differ from the structures of objective reality with high probability…reality is utterly unlike our perceptions of objects in space and time.”
Reality is, in all probability, so unlike our ordinary experience that to see these hidden aspects of it would leave us speechless, fumbling with words that are entirely ill-suited and hopeless to describe it. Much like the effects of psychedelics, incidentally.
While it may have a bizarre ring in our ears, Hoffman is under-girding the ancient philosophical school of Idealism with modern science. Philosophers such as Parmenides and Plato, to Berkeley and Kant and Schopenhauer, have all advocated for versions of idealism. The conviction that the world presented to our senses is “objective” regardless of any connection to a conscious mind, would be laughable to them. Reality, idealists argue, exists first and foremost in consciousness. Why? Because that’s the only conclusion the evidence can possibly support. Consciousness is all we really know. We never encounter a single thing or datum or idea without consciousness. Consciousness is the only reality we can confidently say exists.
So while the brain undeniably correlates with conscious experiences, and while there is always potential to find ever more refined correlations between brain states and conscious experiences, it is too far of a leap to then assume that consciousness exists solely in the brain. It is a completely unjustified assumption. In fact, to reduce consciousness to nothing more than an “emergent” property of the brain is backwards.
The idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, who frequently relies on unusual brain states like the psychedelic experience for his arguments, has set his crosshairs on materialist notions of consciousness, which he sees as a threat to genuine scientific progress. He claims that consciousness, awareness, experience, whatever you want to call it…is in fact fundamental and primary to reality. At bottom, consciousness - or Mind - is all there is. It is consciousness that generates that which our senses perceive to be material. Consciousness makes brains, not the other way around. It is in this way that Kastrup agrees “almost 100%” with Hoffman’s conclusions. For Kastrup and Hoffman, what we perceive to be the external world is a convenient illusion.
According to Kastrup, the entire opera of the universe, from start to finish, is being held in Mind in the same way that we perceive the ideas popping in and out of our own awareness. The physical universe and all of its contents are ideas conceived by Mind-at-large. Imagine my delight when, in researching Kastup’s philosophy for this article, I find that the analogy he uses to illustrate the relationship between Mind and individual human egos is the whirlpool. Each localized instance of consciousness - waking human egos - are like a spinning, circular, “water wheel” emerging within the greater ocean of awareness. Like the whirlpool to the flowing river, an individual ego is not fundamentally different from Mind at large.
What separates the whirlpool from the river? What distinguishes each one of us from Mind-at-large? Kastrup argues that this is precisely the function of the (curiously spiral or whirlpool-shaped) brain: to restrict unrestricted consciousness, to localize omnipresent awareness, to filter the unfiltered I AM. The limited reality which exists in our human perception - the reality in which I am a single, discrete, stable “me” - is not at all absolute or objective, but a a heavily filtered interpretation of reality by the brain. Perhaps, I would add, by the claustrum.
The brain filters out its own subterranean operations. We don’t consciously experience each neuron firing, every network connecting. It all gets summed up into one experience, an aggregate of millions of tiny interactions, into a stable “me” and a solid “now”. But psychedelics like Salvia lift the hood and reveals the machinery of Mind. We see that the most basic components of our reality, the unity of space, time, and ourselves are totally subjective and, with the help of a very tiny amount of an obscure chemical, disappear entirely.
It is perhaps so incredibly difficult to remove this built-in illusion becuase no one can expect to live in a world without a meaningful distinction between ourselves and our environment, other people, or the countless other objects that fill our awareness throughout the day. The ego, however illusory, is absolutely necessary to survive in this world. As Kastrup says, Nature has worked very hard to give us this filter on reality - the ego.
Perhaps, the ancient physician who christened the “claustrum” was more correct than they knew…it is truly a closed gate, a barrier holding off a flood of unfiltered cosmic insights which would otherwise leave us constantly reeling in awe and confusion. And in the claustrum-less realm of Sally Space, one of those insights is the Reality Wheel.
Everything was ending. This was the ‘drain’ for the Universe. Actually, Universe is not big enough, it was the spiraling drain for EVERYTHING, and I was going down it. I can remember that out of what seemed to be my peripheral vision, I could see the entire fabric of space and time was spiraling inward. Distorting in shape as it was being drawn in. I could see off into the distance, FOREVER. Everything was going down this drain and I was in the final spirals before just being GONE. As I was nearing the end of whatever it was I was on, I sensed and could somehow see that I was being stretched and flattened out into a single dimension, like a cardboard cutout. I was coming to the realization that this was the end of everything…
In some strange way it didn’t matter, because I became aware that nothing was really real. All existence was this spiral, and it needed me, us, everything for it’s own existence. It was just a big machine, and all of our perception of life and everything that makes it up was needed by the machine….This was the engine that powered everything and everything was it’s fuel…
“The Wheel of Death” - Kevin
Mind Loops
Our dabbling into Idealism was necessary to navigate even stranger territory that now lies before us. The next question sounds ridiculous on its face, but it is necessary to ask: does this all mean that the Salvia Wheel is an accurate depiction of reality?
I wouldn’t be writing this article if I didn’t think there was something truly significant about the Wheel, and I even think there is something true about the Wheel. But to answer that question while using the ordinary sense of the words “accurate” and "reality ", I couldn’t say yes or no. As some have reported, Salvia also makes you become a shoe. If one is accurate, why isn’t the other one? I will admit, I’ve had to wrestle with this question more than I was comfortable with. Is it really that much crazier to argue that I am a shoe or any of the other impossible Salvia hallucinations, than that all of reality is a rotating metaphysical wheel encompassing all space and time? I think even the most strident believers in the fringe theories which claim psychedelics are a gateway to a different dimension will read descriptions of Salvia and say “nah, that’s just too weird”.
As a side note, I think this is exactly why Salvia has itself remained on the fringe in both society and among experienced psychonauts. So often people don’t really “get” something out of Salvia, aside from the benefits from using it the way the Mazatecs do. They chew or ‘quid’ the leaves resulting in a nice mellow high, but also an incredibly small dose of Salvinorin A. But this is not how one meets the Wheel, it must be smoked. And many people do not have a nice mellow time when smoking concentrated Salvinorin A, to put it mildly. It is an extremely difficult thing to categorize.
This is exactly why I think it holds a hidden treasure.
As we saw above, there are strong reasons to doubt whether we have a complete and objective view of reality as it is. So, if we did encounter something entirely beyond our reality, unbound by the confines of our laws of physics and logic, it would surely contradict everything we thought we knew. It would look like a hallucination. So the strange and the outright contradictory is perhaps the most likely place to find the truths which can’t make it through our biological reality-filter.
Now, back to the topic of becoming a shoe. Does Mind-at-Large also exist in that shoe, somehow, and is it possible for consciousness to have the experience of being a shoe? And further, is it possible that the framework which holds our identity together can be so disrupted by changing brain chemistry that subjective consciousness can ‘slip’ away from our body and identify with something else in the room, such as a pair of crocs?
I do not think these can be so easily dismissed, and I think Idealism explains why.
If we are all filtered instantiations of a greater Mind, and the result of a mysterious process wherein the One becomes many, then there must be a level of awareness that transcends individual distinctions. And with the aid of psychedelics, it is certainly possible to experience becoming “nobody”, or to have an “ego-death”, ie. to be aware without any meaningful distinctions between yourself and your surroundings, your sensations, your memories, even awareness itself. If a shoe exists in Mind, as Idealism states, surely it is possible for Mind to be aware of being a shoe, or any of the other inanimate objects which people have identified with under the influence of Salvia.
This opens up a winding rabbit hole, which I will enthusiastically avoid to keep us on track. It is enough that consciousness is at the bottom of all things, and all things share in one universal consciousness. In the words of Spinoza, “there is but one Mind”. Granting that, why must this “Mind” be circular? Of all possible shapes and patterns why does it appear as a drain, a spiral, or a wheel? Perhaps a major clue lies in that invention of the reality filter in our brains: the unique “me” created mostly, if not entirely, by the claustrum.
At the core, that same “me” is circular by its very nature. Or, put so concisely by Douglas Hofstadter, “I am a Strange Loop ''.
It is hard to summarize his monumental work which bears that quote as its title, it sprawls across intellectual fields at the direction of someone who is a master of them all. Within this book, Hofstadter reveals the repeating patterns in our minds which create a “strange loop”, one that gives rise to the immediate intuition of a self. These loops appear to be progressing but, contradictingly, they end up right where they started. Hofstadter leans heavily on the paradoxical artwork of MC Escher to illustrate his ideas, but the Salvia Wheel might as well be the cover illustration.
Hofstadter begins with the hallmark of conscious awareness: self-reflection. To have not just an idea of ourselves, but to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves, to have meta-awareness, this appears to be fundamental to human conscious experience. After all, no matter what the conscious experience is of, whether it be of delight or coffee or quantum mechanics, it always belongs to a subject, a “me” that is having that experience. This is the first clue to the “looping” nature of consciousness.
But Hofstadter says that it is not just a loop, but a strange one. There is something inherently paradoxical about it. We intuitively know that we exist, but as soon as we try to prove the existence of an “I” we have to assume it already exists. “I know I exist because I have a body”, for example, tries to prove the existence of an “I” while assuming its reality. Like Escher’s “Waterfall”, “I exist' ' seems to be a perfectly rational argument but becomes an impossible paradox upon closer inspection. The logic is recursive, making the existence of the self both the most obviously true and least verifiable thing we can believe in.
And if that isn’t enough, what exactly is “I” supposed to refer to? We use it in dozens of different ways. Is it the enormous process of microscopic interactions that just so happens to take the shape of our bodies? Or is it the bundle of memories, sensations, beliefs, emotions, etc. that weave together to create our sense of individuality? Or is it our relationships, our status, our hopes and dreams, etc? Surely, we are not referring to all of these together when we say things like “I am hungry” or “I am sad”...instead, we pick and choose which level of abstraction we mean depending on the circumstance all while using the exact same word - I - each and every time, as if there is never a meaningful distinction. So, not only is it impossible to prove the existence of an “I”, we can’t even pin down what it means.
In this way, our reality is itself a kind of wheel. The subjective self is made out of ideas and feelings which fold back into themselves, creating the illusion of a “me”. My hunch is that the Salvia Wheel is what happens when the same fundamental circular pattern which gives rise to the subjective self loses the ordinary boundaries imposed by the human brain — but since Consciousness doesn’t stop, the recursive “folding in on itself”-ness continues without the limitations of the ego. The mechanism which generates the ordinary illusion of the subjective self is no longer filtered and isolated by the brain. At this point, it can identify with anything and everything, from a distant ancestor, to an impossible shape, to a pair of shoes. Becuase, it’s all in Mind anyway.
Reality Wheels
There is another way in which the Salvia Wheel is real, and it transcends even the strange loops that create the sense of self. If the distinctions between ourselves and the world are illusions, then surely we will find the looping pattern “out there” in the world as well. And we certainly do.
It is impossible to investigate this topic without directly confronting the fact that wheels, loops, circles and spirals hold profound meaning in nearly all the sacred traditions across human history. There isn’t a religion anywhere in the world that doesn’t, in one way or the other, use these circular symbols to elevate the heart and mind.
The petroglyphs scattered across the American west were painted by peoples who frequently incorporated this symbol in their sacred art. It represented the spirit, the Creator, or even reality itself. The Lakota medicine-man Black Elk believed the circle contained a unique, spiritual force. “Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle”, he said. The sky is filled with circular objects, both day and night. The wind gains its power from whirls. From the cycles of the seasons, to the cycle of human life - “childhood to childhood” - nature moves in the shape of a circle.
In ancient Greece, philosophers believed there was divine power in the mathematical proportions of the circle. The Pythagoreans, the famous cult of number worshipers, discovered the formula for finding the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter; pi. Empedocles, influenced by the Pythagoreans, claimed “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Plato soon after claimed that the world had a spherical soul, composed of the intersection of distinct circles.
From the yin-yangs of the ancient far east, to the labyrinths of medieval cathedrals, even to the flying saucers of the modern age, the human mind has associated circles with both immanence and transcendence, nature and supernature, time and eternity.
But, there are also those who, while acknowledging the profundity of the circle, recognized an inherent limitation of a mere two-dimensional shape. These circles could not move. And without movement, how accurate could a symbol of reality actually be? Reality changes. It often even repeats. So any reality-circle must, by necessity, rotate.
Sometimes spirals were used to give the impression of a rotation. A spiral could represent the seasons, the stars, or existence itself. The labyrinth was a complex maze that was essentially a spiral, often found on the floor of many gothic churches. The believer who walked its winding path eventually ended in the center, the ultimate destination of spiritual growth. Those same churches often featured rose windows, which told a cyclical story. Each petal represented one important stage of a self-repeating process; round and round you went on the endless “wheel of fortune”, for example.
In the East, it is said that the Buddha painted the first bhavachakra, or the “wheel of existence”. This image is still revered in many parts of the world, and used to grow in wisdom about the meaning of life and death. It symbolizes, with exquisite detail, the cyclical nature of existence.
The yin-yang, too, is in motion. It is not static. For the Daoists, to meditate on the yin-yang is to meditate on the ever changing balance of opposites. To live out this balance every minute of every day, amidst the constant flux of life, is to be enlightened.
The Native American medicine wheel is used by various indigenous cultures. It's a representation of the cycle of life, the seasons, and the interconnected-ness of all things. The medicine wheel embodies a symbolic movement through the cycles of nature and life, emphasizing the journey of growth and learning.
An exhaustive list of the circles and wheels that litter religious art could go on for many more pages. The halo. The zodiac. The encircled cross. The flower of life. The dot. The Seal of God. Elijah and the Wheel in the sky. The Japanese ensō…It is the pre-eminent image that lofts the mind up to the sublime heights of mystical wisdom.
But if we were to pick only one example from the entire history of sacred circles that captures nearly all that can possibly be captured by the symbol, it would be the mandala. Sanskrit for “circle”, a mandala is a geometric design that is both symmetrical and circular in nature. It typically features intricate patterns, shapes, and symbols that radiate outward from a central point. The concept of mandalas is ancient, and they have appeared in various forms across different cultures and time periods.
The exact age of the mandala is impossible to determine, as it has been a feature of cultural and spiritual expression for a very long time. Some of the earliest examples of mandalas can be found in ancient Indian and Tibetan art dating back over a thousand years. Similar designs can be traced even further back in various cultures and civilizations.
Today, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the ancient practice of creating sand mandalas continues on. These are meticulously hand-crafted by monks using colored sand; the intricate patterns are constructed from the center outward. The process of creating the mandala involves a sense of flow and energy as the monks precisely place the colored sand to form the design. This is a meditative practice that embodies the idea of spiritual energy radiating outward. The artists don’t just make the mandala, they encounter it. It’s not just an image, the act of creating the mandala has spiritual power. Through it, one finds and channels their spiritual center.
There is even a therapeutic practice today, utilized by a growing number of mental health professionals, which relies on mandalas. In this practice, the patient is presented with a collection of cards, each with a mandala on it. The patient is instructed to pick a mandala that they believe corresponds to their current inner state, then they recreate it with their own hand, decorating it with whatever colors or symbols they see fit. The entire process is intended to stimulate psychological growth.
The connection between the psyche and the mandala was first recognized, at least in modern times, by the psychiatrist Carl Jung, who became fixated on the psychological power of the mandala and spent much of his own time analyzing the mandalas created by patients, and creating his own.
Jung believed that the mandala was more than just a symbol, it was an archetypal image of the Self. Without diving into a technical treatment of archetypes, suffice it to say that the archetype of the Self is the core - the heartbeat - of experience; it is both the bedrock and source of all consciousness. Deeper than persona, the ego, the shadow, and all the other distinct parts of ourselves sits the Self, radiating outward through them all.
Just as all the different parts of ourselves are unified into a whole “me”, an identity through which the Self shrines through uniquely in each one of us, so too is the mandala the epitome of wholeness - despite the different patterns that compose it, all are held together by the geometrical center. For this reason, Jung believed that the mandala corresponded directly with the Self, and had an intrinsically healing character on the psyche:
“...it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.”
Like Black-Elk, the Daoists, and the long history of sacred art, Jung recognized not only the inherently cyclical nature of life and reality, but also of the individual psyche. The goal of life is not to ascend some linear path of perpetual self-improvement, said Jung, but instead, like the creation of a mandala, to engage in a constantly changing, rotating, whirling dance around that central point in our own souls - a “circumambulation of the Self”. It is fascinating to note here that trippers who experience being pulled into the center of the Wheel report that this is when the trip ends, bringing them back to normal reality…
Perhaps the profoundly disordered psychological state triggered by Salvia’s effects on the brain demands a compensatory mandala: the all-encompassing, cosmic wheel of Samsara.
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. But anywhere is the center of the world. - Excerpt from Black Elk’s account of a near-death experience
‘Time is a Flat Circle’
History repeats itself, so they say. We see patterns emerge across time and conclude that there are cyclical laws built into history. The oppressed become oppressors who in turn create future oppressors. The rise and fall of nations seems to follow predictable patterns. The trajectory of our lives can sometimes resemble our parents’ and even grandparents’ in often inexplicable ways. But of course, upon closer inspection, there are always enough particular differences which allow us to dismiss this idea of a literal repeating pattern in history.
There is another way to view this intuition, though. It abstracts from particulars and looks at certain patterns from a kind of ten-thousand foot aerial view. It doesn’t speak to isolated events, but rather general tendencies and processes that do, clearly, repeat themselves again and again.
Mircea Eliade, the great mythologist and contemporary of Carl Jung, spoke about this fact of reality in his book The Myth of Eternal Return. Eliade is not speaking about the philosophical concept of eternal return, as described by Nietzsche and others. He is not saying events themselves will be repeated over and over again throughout time. Instead, he says that it is the oscillating cycle of sacred time and profane time which repeats itself. Sacred time refers to the realm of mythology, which is the ultimate source of meaning and significance for human consciousness. It is not confined to profane time, which is the mere chronological progress of historical events. The underlying meaning of those events, if they are significant in any way, is explicitly derived from sacred time, from myth. Profane time flows as a linear progression of events, but insofar as it has purpose and a direction, it belongs to sacred time.
As creatures who straddle these two dimensions, sacred and profane, humanity is required to travel back and forth between them throughout the course of our lives, whether it be every day, every year, every decade, etc. We must immerse ourselves in the nature of the physical world and historical time in order to thrive and survive, we must acquire food and shelter and enjoy the pleasures of the body just like any other animal, but we must do all this in relation to some higher purpose. We don’t even have a choice in this, it is the nature of human consciousness to live with purpose, and to see purpose embedded within reality as a whole. Without placing our lives in the context of some greater myth, which is found exclusively in “sacred time”, we won’t even be able to live in profane time. In other words, we must eternally return to the sacred realm of myth. By periodically going back to the “mythological age”, usually enacted through some ritual or religious rite, time itself is turned into a circle: becoming the eternal cycle of Death and Rebirth.
To be clear, it's not only the people who perform these rituals which are renewed. It is the entire cosmos. The world itself needs to be reborn, over and over again, and it is the function of ritual to ensure this successfully happens. The cosmos “must be periodically renewed or it may perish” says Eliade.
In a way, I see this as a kind of extrapolation of Hofstadter's “strange loop”. No longer confined to the individual ego, but built into the structure of intelligible reality because the very nature of meaning itself is a strange, cyclical loop. As Eliade notes, anything which means anything at all is something that participates in the myth of death and rebirth. It just so happens that as soon as we encounter something meaningful at all, we are simultaneously encountering something that participates, in its own way, in the grand myth. From particles to animals to societies and everything in between and beyond. Anything that can mean anything at all to humans is meaningful to the degree that it can be contextualized within this myth.
But this is where the Eternal Return is more than just a loop, it is also ‘strange’ in Hofsdtater’s technical sense; the causal relationship flows both ways. A thing participates in myth because it is real, but it also is real to the degree that it is mythological. And even deeper, built into the Myth itself is the illogical and contradictory notion that death is the very means through which rebirth occurs. Like the mythical Ouroboros, contradiction lies squarely at the heart of both myth and meaning. Just like how the sense of self is built on a kind of self-reflexive paradox that repeatedly spirals in on itself, so too does the universe we inhabit.
All things follow this fundamental pattern, and we have yet to discover anything which is not inevitably subject to both deterioration and renewal. As Black Elk observed, all of Nature appears to be following the pattern of the “whirl”, from the dance of the sun and moon, to the perpetual rotation of seasons, to the cycle of human life: “childhood to childhood”.
Even scientifically speaking, the fundamental second law of thermodynamics appears to lead directly to its opposite according to the “Cyclic models” (or “myths”) of the universe, like those proposed by both Albert Einstein and Roger Penrose. They both acknowledge that the universe is indeed on an irreversible path of increasing entropy, where randomness is gradually overcoming order and will eventually become the absolute state. But in the end, that absolute state of chaos and randomness will give rise to another big bang, in what’s called the “Big Bounce”. The idea is that the universe goes through this cycle of death and rebirth, contraction and expansion, over and over again ad infinitum.
Without exaggeration, there is not a single thing humans can understand or intuit which doesn’t, in some way, participate in this great myth. To be understood by a human mind is to be a thing which is caught up in the great mandala, the wheel of death and rebirth. There are no exceptions. This same notion can be inferred from Kevin’s report of the Salvia Wheel, which I quoted at the beginning:
“All existence was this spiral, and it needed me, us, everything for it’s own existence. It was just a big machine, and all of our perception of life and everything that makes it up was needed by the machine…This was the engine that powered everything and everything was it’s fuel…”
For an idealist, according to whom the universe is fundamentally mental, this makes sense. In some very real way the universe does depend on consciousness to exist. Consciousness is indeed the spiraling engine that powers all things which can be known, which for us is no different from saying simply “everything”.
Moreover, the myth of Death and Rebirth is explicitly found all over Salvia Wheel reports. People say that when they see the Wheel they suddenly remember that they were there before they were born, and they will return there when they die. All the millions of lives that can be lived, which have been and will be lived, exist inside it as options which can be arbitrarily chosen.
As Turning describes in his trip report “Many, Many Lives”:
“Slowly, I was becoming more capable of rational thought and understood that I had been catapulted into a terrifying vision of Samsara, the endless cycle of birth and death. I was looking at my origins, my future and the whole of the endlessly and violently changing universe. There is no such thing as the essential self. There is nothing but everything, every form is temporary and endlessly changing. So, what was “I” could assume any part of the universe, any life and play that role perfectly normally. “I” was only here in this reality for a while and then I would go back to this wheel and assume another reality some day.”
The Return
Alduous Huxley said we perceive our world through a keyhole in the doors of perception, and he’s right. The human eye sees a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. The human ear can only perceive frequencies between the range of 20Hz and 20kHz, far more limited than much of the animal kingdom. And without the aid of computers and calculators and the emerging AI, some of the most fundamental aspects of modern society are both imperceptible and unintelligible to the human mind.
So when we are confronted with the effects of psychedelics or mystical revelations, with all their visions and mind-expanding insights, we have a choice to make. Either shoehorn it into our tiny, evolutionarily adapted keyhole, comfortably within the confines of our limited perception; or, we can take that profound feeling of expanded awareness seriously, even at face value. We can hold on to it tightly, cling to it as an undeniable truth, even when we are “back” from that divine space and compelled to once again pick up the cross of our daily struggle with this material world. We can believe with absolute certainty that, despite the patent contradictions to our assumptions about space and time, some psychedelic hallucinations are not simply distortions, but real and true. In fact, more real than anything else.
Both approaches can spell catastrophe. In their extremes, the first approach snuffs out meaning in any conscious experience, psychedelic or not, and leaves you stranded in a void of meaningless unconsciousness. The latter devolves into delusional psychosis, and potentially leaves you institutionalized…tragically unable to accomplish the entire point of filtering the One into the many. The way forward is a thin path between these two chasms. The solution is ultimately this: visions like the Salvia Wheel show us a version of reality, one that is often neither useful nor conducive to survival but can be for those who have gone through the crucible of the material world and have, through wisdom and love, come out “whole” on the other side. Those who have encountered the Cosmic Wheel must create sand mandalas on the canvas of their own lives, repeatedly oscillating between both the sacred realm of myth and the profane realm of illusion.
So far we have seen how reality is cyclic at every level. From the Universe as a whole, to the objects that fill it, to the minds, or Mind, which is aware of it all. We have seen how the structure of consciousness, time, and nature is a strange loop that folds into itself. This intuition has been so deeply felt throughout the ages that it is found in nearly all religions and all mythologies. Wherever people have sought to depict ultimate reality, there we will find wheels, spirals, and circles. Should we really be surprised at all that, in altered states of consciousness when our unique sense of self disappears, one can encounter a Cosmic Wheel? Wouldn’t it be more strange to say that this archetypal symbol appears by sheer coincidence, as merely a side-effect of abnormal brain activity?
While I have yet to swallow my fear and seek out this experience for myself, I believe so. I believe in the widened eyes and breathless awe of those who have seen it. I believe in the utter absurdity that the gate to mystical insight can be found at a dilapidated smoke shop. I believe we live in an illusion, a precious hoax that is accomplishing something mysterious in the Universe. I believe the Salvia Wheel churns at the heart of reality, waiting for our return…
The object resembled a giant waterwheel lying on its side and rotating as it approached me and my vehicle. As it got closer, this didn’t take time, as we understand it. I saw that my first observation about its size was wildly inaccurate. It was more like the size of a small city. As it got closer still, I understood that all scale and distance estimates were meaningless. It was larger than what we think of as the world…As the object drew near to me, a kind of sensation came over my person and I knew exactly what this thing was. Not only that, but I knew everything that pertained to it, what it was, what it was doing, what it’s 'business' was with me, where and when I had seen it before, why I was seeing it now, and many many other things that I cannot now recall.
I had seen the object before I was born and I will see it again when I die. We all knew it before we were born. We will all see it when we die. But this information is eclipsed from us while we are alive. And that was why I was seeing it now in the experience, because I was in the process of dying in a fatal car crash.
Here’s what I can remember, as best it words can tell. This wheel wasn’t something that moved towards me through the world, or through reality somehow. That was an illusion that my senses were constructing for me. The wheel WAS reality, itself. It represented EVERY CONCEIVABLE POSSIBILITY for a life or for a world that could ever be envisioned or imagined. As it approached, I became aware that what we call our world was contained within it. It was simply one of the numberless slots or paddles in the 'water wheel.' It had always been so. My life, your life, our world, all of us - we were a part of this wheel structure and we had always been a part of this structure. It simply now made itself visible to me…- Excerpt from a near-death experience reported by ‘Wilson’.
This was an amazing read. It's rare to see an exploration of Salvia Divinorum so spot on, from someone who never took it.
What a blockbuster! Check out Kashmiri Shaivism, btw, for an in-depth, experience-based philosophy of consciousness, which takes consciousness as the fundamental reality/ground of being. There is only universal consciousness, of which our separate, individual selves are constricted microcosms.