Disorder and the search for a pattern to impose
Salvia leaf is physically quite safe. It is very gentle on the body. Studies have shown that salvinorin A is extraordinarily non-toxic. No one has ever died from a Salvia overdose. Salvia is not habit-forming or addictive. People who choose to use Salvia, tend to do so quite infrequently. Salvia is not a stimulant, it is not a sedative, it is not a narcotic, it is not a tranquilizer. Like many entheogens, at sufficiently high doses it can induce visions, yet it is quite different from other entheogens. Dale Pendell, in his book Pharmako/poeia, assigns Salvia divinorum to a unique pharmacological class, which he calls "existentia." This term alludes to the philosophical illumination Salvia seems to shine on the nature of existence itself.
This is from the website now archived, https://web.archive.org/web/20220331000912/http://www.sagewisdom.org/usersguide.html sagewisdom.org.
I don’t really believe in there being an essence to any person. That’s dualism. But my aunt said of my mother, when she spoke to her on the phone not long ago, ‘her essence is still there’ and I knew exactly what she meant. Some people might go hollow with memory loss, become a kind of zombie, or automaton, or so one might be led to believe, given the appalling statistics on dementia, particularly among an aging populace. Maybe. Maybe that will happen still to Mum, but somehow I doubt it. I think out of whatever is going on for her, there’s still a sense of who she is, of that collection of experiences and how they came together, in the physical manifestation of her being a long distance cyclist, and a potter, a single parent, and a poet and singer (though she never did enough singing) and composer and player of music (though she never did enough of music composition after a brilliant early start). It rings out in what makes her laugh (often ironically, given the physical pain she is in, and the mental anguish she no doubt has to deal with in the moments of lucidity when it is clear that something about her capacity to function as a thinking being has gone horribly awry). Even the house she lives in contains her like an extended limb, grown out of her own tastes, and adventures, and shaped by her love for the sun, and plants and the garden, and books, and art.
Pratyekabuddhist that I am (perhaps), I think that we are a collection of experiences, a la Hume (perhaps), that we don’t have an essence, as such, but that there is awareness, and that awareness itself goes beyond our individual selves and unites us both with one another and with a wider recognition of our continuity with the rest of the living world, and also, naturally enough, with the non living world that exists as the mesh within which biology nests.
So I practise without a license. I practise while also struggling with the same old sets of harmful habits that have haunted me as long as I can remember. The tendency to pick away at things, at scabs or spots - yes, not a habit I’m proud of - which I now see as contiguous with the tendency to want to uncover and unearth anything poisonous that sits beneath the skin, to seek clarity, to release the pus and let healing begin, which is also at the heart of research, when research is into the dark places, which is what I’ve tasked myself with recently.
This is not an attractive read, I’m aware. But it’s an attempt to expose to the light of day what otherwise might continue to fester beneath the surface - what is hard to talk about, or taboo. Even if I don’t believe I have a soul, or essence, or essential self that requires revealing, I do think that being in this fluid state of coming into being continuously, existing within the flow of internal and external conditions always interacting, reflecting, mutually reinforcing or dissolving, still requires a kind of practise to uncover where the poison lies, to dig into places where deceit or avoidance hides, and bring them to light. Perhaps ingesting poison is another way to bring it into focus. Perhaps some of us are more inclined to explore with, than to conform to, the limits and possibilities of different states of being. Certainly, I’d like to learn to do this in a way that is less destructive, more compassionate, more elegant and graceful. But if I find the only way to get into the dark places is by bloody excavation, I’ll take that route. Until I learn a better way.
As the Bible (Exodus 34: 7) says (King James Version):
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
And that is why I’m exploring different ways of seeing and understanding what’s going on while I write about a massacre and my ancestor’s involvement. It’s not guilt, although I do wonder about the provenance of the emeralds in my ring. Hence the reference to the sins of the fathers, something deeply rooted in my own exploration of my family history and its reliance on violent expropriation, and a denial based on a commitment to some set of values that justified all this.
It’s not self flagellation - how would that bring back the lineages lost during the long, brutal battle to expropriate the lands of the original people of Australia? I wasn’t there. I don’t think the genes I’ve inherited from those who were, watered down by five or six or seven generations of intertwining with others who were not there makes me culpable - and yet the sins are visited, in strangely aposite ways, a kind of twisted karma in the grappling for money, the predatory behaviour of so many of my male, but also of some of my female relatives, depression, unhappy relationships, a kind of inherent restlessness and dissatisfaction. The reasonable man adapts to the world, the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. That the mindset within which I was reared. I am of this, even unintentionally. This is something I meditate on too.
The actions of those generations undoubtedly influenced the actions of their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, and my own anxieties and harmful habits have deep roots in familial patterns I can recognise in my mother (she also picks away at the skin of her fingers until it bleeds; she also has a restless nature, and an overarching urgency about her, pushing her to extremes.) We’re different in many ways but these traits are evident in our family, and I see them in cousins, nephews, nieces, my children, my uncle, in different but related and recognisable forms. A kind of extremist push or pull for excellence but also for excess, for going over the edge and into a realm as yet unexplored, risking all. And if this meant that those who would stand in the way got harmed in the process, that was sometimes shrugged off, sometimes angrily rejected: what matters more than MY needs, particularly if I am evidently prepared to risk my own neck?
This is hard to face, hard to face up to and yet, as an outsider, someone whose affiliation is more closely aligned to the wild, to the untaught, and unteachable, which is also a kind of gut instinct, I have a sense of resonance with those whose lives and lineages were stolen, broken, harmed or annihilated by the acts and attitudes of those who I belong to, in the sense of descend from.
65000 years of cultural history. Today I read an article about Murujuga in North Western Australia which has been recognised as having world heritage value https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/endangered-aboriginal-rock-art-gets-unesco-world-heritage-status and yet mining companies continue to exploit the land nearby and even plan to expand, despite evidence that their activities are contributing to the degradation of the quality of some of the rock art, mainly through acidification of the rock.
Yet each tiny step, each tiny act, each iota of compassion creates one more traceless trace, one more reconciliation, integration, acceptance of the truth, and those tiny, revolutionary shifts in perception and response are where the dance is. Voice, Treaty, Truth failed to be voted in but the Aboriginal people have taken another step towards acknowledgment. This will accumulate, and eventually, perhaps, the shift to another way of being will prevail. Perhaps. Even if not, like the fight for stewardship and an acknowledgment that we are in an ecological emergency and that how we respond depends on attitude changes us, and that is what matters: not the outcome, but how we are right now.
Dale Pendell accepted that those of us who are outside the system looking in, while also being embedded in the system, have a place too. So I will continue to explore and experiment, and I hope that I can find some place in the world for the kind of approach I’m taking. Is it real? I don’t know! Myth or reality? Play? Or deadly serious? It’s the exploration of ways of dealing with dying, which is as much a part of living as anything.
Life is deadly, for sure. Acceptance of the transience of our existence, but acceptance too that ghosts, the past, the way things were, create this moment, and therefore the future. Except that we have this capacity to elicit an attitude each time we come into this particular wave of in and out breathing, more kindly towards the transient physical state of the body, with all its tendencies to avoid pain if at all possible. And why not? Why not accept that the way of Aboriginal knowledge is deep, but has more in common with zazen, and wu wei, with not doing as doing in the making of the parklands of New South Wales, so remarked on by the first European settlers, than with the ambition to grow personal wealth and political power regardless of the impact on the integrity of the place and its people that was - and is - so characteristic of the colonial mindset?
Where do I fit in? Somewhere in between. Neither, and both. Non dual. Non binary? (I’m firmly female! So, no!). But open to change? I don’t think we crack open the world, I think it cracks us open, shows us our own yolk, what’s feeding us, what’s bleeding us, and gives us chances, if we’re prepared to pay attention, to offer our own bowed heads in honour of those whose voices still echo in the memory, whose ghosts still haunt us, whose hands (adult hands, and children’s hands: was it all a game?) still lie silhouetted on the rocks, after 50, 000 years, reminding us of play, and dreaming, and the patterns we impose or live within.