Experience
Making sense of the experience
Coming back can be as puzzling as leaving.
You may remember a world folding away, a pull in an impossible direction, or the feeling of becoming part of an object. Others may have seemed to know you. Or what remains may be less an image than a conviction: this was familiar, and somehow you had forgotten it.
I draw here on my own accounts, later reflections, and other first-person reports. The descriptions offer points of comparison, rather than a fixed sequence. What became unfamiliar? What still seemed known? How did ordinary life become available again?
When the world loses its bearings
In my own recollections, the opening disruption can feel like the scene and gravity bending together. Imagery and presences arise as the ordinary setting loses its hold. I have described the resulting space as being wide awake within a dream: scenes appear, but they need not feel chosen or under my control.
In these recollections, the scenes are more than pictures. They carry bodily sensation, emotion, and the familiarity of a whole situation. At times, the swirling imagery has felt like scenes from my life, present through feeling as well as sight. Remembering them is also remembering what it felt like to be there.
When your life comes back
What returns may be more than information. A name becomes your name again. A room belongs to your life. Relationships, obligations, and the fact of having taken Salvia recover their meaning. The difference is between knowing a fact and recognizing it as part of your own history.
Two questions help separate the memory problems: what could you remember during the experience, and what can you remember of it afterward? You may retain a memory of being unable to recall your life. You may also have gaps in your memory of the episode itself. Both can occur in the same account.
Some accounts describe a gradual return; others, an abrupt ending. The contrast draws attention to something usually taken for granted: memories do more than supply a past. They help locate experience within a life that feels like yours.
A clearing in the experience
In later reflections, I have described a clearing: familiar references, memories, and personal bearings seem to fall away while awareness remains. Witness or observer names the felt position from which I recall noticing what was happening. Whether this reflects an enduring witness, a residual self-model, or a reconstruction in memory remains open. A related description appears in Account 14:
“there is nothing, only my awareness of the nothingness”
Account 14 retrospectively describes thought arising, attention turning toward what was arising for “Rich,” and a tethered return toward body and biography. Nothing describes the stillness or emptiness I remember. It is not a claim that every feature of experience had vanished.
Advaita interprets the distinction between awareness and changing contents as a witness. One naturalistic explanation is that an observer-like process becomes available while autobiographical orientation remains incomplete. This would allow the remembered contrast without requiring an independently existing witness. The account does not establish the underlying sequence or decide between these interpretations.
The feeling of having been here before
A scene can feel familiar even when nothing in ordinary memory explains why. It may seem like home, while everyday life feels distant or forgotten. The puzzle is this reversal of what belongs.
J. D. Arthur describes material forgotten in ordinary awareness becoming accessible again in later Salvia sessions. One possibility is that a similar state reopens access to an earlier experience. Another is that the feeling of familiarity itself changes, giving an unfamiliar scene the quality of something already known. The latter remains a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated Salvia mechanism.
What survived the return: a specific remembered detail, a memory of an earlier encounter, or an overwhelming feeling of knowing? The distinction matters. A sense of timeless repetition may belong to the experience even when no earlier occasion can be recalled.
Presences and the feeling of being put back
An apparent other may seem to know you, expect you, or take part in your return. Sometimes the stronger impression is that the entire situation has been arranged: you are being shown something, kept from something, or restored to a life you had forgotten.
This raises several questions. What gives a presence its apparent independence? Why does a transition feel imposed? What significance does the encounter have afterward? Jung’s approach to apparently autonomous figures helps explore that significance while leaving their independent existence unresolved.
A presence may seem to understand what is happening when you do not. That asymmetry belongs in the description, alongside the sense that the return was guided or imposed. The Argument essay examines possible explanations.
Living with the experience
“It felt as though I was being put back” describes a remembered quality. “Someone put me back” adds an explanation. Holding that distinction allows the experience to remain significant while its interpretation stays open to revision.
Start with the particulars. What do you remember seeing or feeling? What did you seem to know at the time? What did you conclude only afterward? Writing these separately can preserve an experience before a compelling explanation reshapes its details.
What the experience means may change as you remember it, talk about it, and return to ordinary life. You do not have to settle the nature of consciousness to take it seriously.