My name is Freedom Shapes. I have 700 loop pedals connected to a flute. On top of making music and music videos, I’m an independent writer and journalist, investigating the hidden story of Salvia divinorum, a powerful psychoactive plant with deep roots in Mazatec tradition and an uncertain future in modern science, law, philosophy and consciousness research. Simply put, I am one of the many plant lovers who want to help lift Salvia divinorum out of obscurity and into a more stable role in public interest and academic research.
Through a project I call The Mint Files, I’ve sent FOIA requests to over a dozen U.S. agencies to uncover how the government may have studied, surveilled, and responded to Salvia’s presence in the United States since it was brought here from Oaxaca for propagation, extraction and chemical isolation. I’m particularly interested in how agencies may have documented the plant’s effects and the recurring archetypes of the Salvia experience, and what those findings might imply about human potential and consciousness itself.
In addition to filing formal information requests, I’ve produced and published experiential replication videos of my experiments with Salvia divinorum. These are my firsthand attempts to document and communicate the not so subtle mechanics and phenomenology of the Salvia state. These replications are part of a larger effort to investigate how altered states may shed light on evolutionary psychology, and even the metaphysical conundrums which have plagued philosophy since the pre-Socratics and beyond.
When I was 14 years old, I purchased the strongest psychedelic known to man from a gas station in Simi Valley, California. A highly potent, dried leaf extract form of Salvia Divinorum. Purple Sticky Salvia 40x. I spent that weekend smoking it out of a can in the parking lot behind a grocery store with my friend. The first time I smoked salvia, I did not notice any effects at all. By the third or fourth consecutive time, I found that it put me in a daze in which I would feel terrified to the point of hilarity while being sucked into the ground as my vision began to pixilate and replicate into swirling patterns of primary colors amongst a sea of symbols and noise.
The noise sounded as if it were the murmurings of an invisible crowd, conversing in a cosmic amphitheater, waiting for a show to begin in which I was the star. I felt the tug of something pulling me through, as if I had been summoned. I sensed it wasn’t me who was using the plant, but some other force was using the plant to get to me. I could feel the thin veneer of reality dissolving around me. As if I could simply just breakthrough. This was the first time in which I felt something luring me, as if a fisherman from another dimension was luring me towards the line hoping to rip me from my comfortable material form, and reel me into the realm of mind itself. On the second day, something different happened when I smoked it. I brokethrough.
As I took a deep breath outwards, I descended into a machine. My body seemed to re-materialize layer by layer. I was no longer myself but a more true form, a tiny yellow square, riding with a crowd along a moving belt. Surrounding me was a cartoonish scene. A factory of gears, pulleys, levers, pipes and wheels, operated by a community of gnomes who became uproarious upon my arrival. Dressed in styled caps, colorful leather doublets and buckles festooned upon their shoes, the gnomes unleashed an enormous cheer, and a celebration began in my honor. What ensued can only be described as trombone blowing madness. Hundreds of gnomes bounced up and down and surrounded me with an intemperate joy.
So unreasonably excessive was their joy that I became frightened. The more the fear took hold, the more senseless and unrestrained they became. They grew so animate with excitation that their shapes too took a more true form. The true forms bounced in and out of me filling me with abstrusities about the nature of reality, to the extent in which I became so ineffably perplexed, that my form began to dematerialize, dissociate, re-localize and reshape back into myself. My “real” self. A 14-year-old boy who had just smoked the strongest psychedelic known to man, behind dumpster in a Ralph’s parking lot.
These experiences with Salvia Divinorum have since become the needle of my philosophical compass. I might be lost. Hopelessly, terrifyingly lost. Dissociated into lunacy. Vacuumed into a void of ontological absurdity and following the needle, deeper into the shadowy tentacles of entropic madness. This is the risk we all must take in the search for truth.
-Freedom Shapes
freedomshapes.com 