Reading companion · Glossary
Words for the inquiry
Memory, awareness, and the sense of being someone.
These definitions come from the manuscript’s glossary appendix, with seven reading aids drawn from Part 2. Terms retain the context in which they are used: a reported experience, an explanatory model, or a named tradition.
Similar words do not make different frameworks equivalent. Their use here does not establish that a traditional state occurred under Salvia. Follow a term to its sources, the argument, or the manuscript’s glossary appendix.
Analytic Idealism
Alter
a localized, bounded configuration of universal consciousness; what individual minds are under Kastrup's framework. The biological body is what an alter looks like from outside the dissociative boundary.
Gnostic tradition
Anamnesis
un-forgetting; recollection not of a past event but of what was always the case. In the Platonic original: recollection of the Forms. In Gnostic use: recollection of the pneumatic self's origin in the Pleroma. In this manuscript's two-amnesia vocabulary: under the veil readings, anamnesis names the brief failure of the constitutive amnesia — not a recovery from the session amnesia (see Constitutive amnesia; Session amnesia).
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Anugraha
the fifth act of Śiva; grace, self-revelation; the same gesture as tirodhāna seen from its other aspect. If tirodhāna is the concealment, anugraha is its lifting — built into the same structure.
Gnostic tradition
Archon
(Greek: ruler) the ignorant or adversarial lower powers who administer the material world in Gnostic cosmology. In the manuscript: the name for whatever maintains the ordinary forgetting if that forgetting is adversarially structured.
Tibetan traditions
Bardo
"between" or intermediate state. In the six-bardo scheme used in Part 3, the three post-mortem bardos — death-point, reality, and existence — sit alongside the bardos of life, dream, and meditation. The manuscript uses the post-mortem sequence comparatively; it does not claim that Salvia reproduces a canonical Tibetan sequence.
Tibetan traditions
Chikhai bardo
the death-point or clear-light bardo. Part 3 uses it as a comparator for dissolution and death-point clear-light recognition; it does not identify Salvia onset with this bardo.
Tibetan traditions
Chönyid bardo
the reality bardo, associated with visionary experience and, in the Bardo Thödol, the specific iconography of peaceful and wrathful deities. Part 3 compares some encounter-rich Salvia material with this structural role without asserting identity of content, sequence, or ontology.
Tibetan traditions
Clear light
Wangyal distinguishes the natural clear light of waking life from the clear lights of sleep, samadhi, and death, associating them respectively with external appearances, dream, thought, and bardo visions as obstacles to maintaining presence; they are parallel clear-light contexts, not identical conditions (Wangyal 1998). In sleep practice, neither subject nor object is present. This objectless condition provides a bounded tradition-specific comparator for Arthur's thought-free-awareness reports and Account 14's remembered “nothingness”; neither Salvia report establishes that Wangyal's technical condition occurred. Thurman renders the death-point instruction as recognition of one's own naked awareness as the clear light (Padmasambhava 1994); whether that English rendering translates rig pa is not established here.
Framework interpretations
Constitutive amnesia
the framework-level proposal, made in different forms by Gnostic, Śaiva, and Idealist readings, that ordinary bounded selfhood involves an ongoing concealment or restriction of access which the rupture may temporarily loosen. It is an interpretive object, not a phenomenological given. Part 4 compares adversarial and Śaiva readings with the naturalistic alternative rather than treating constitutive amnesia as established. Under Analytic Idealism, dissociative individuation supplies one process reading; its resumption can be interpreted as renewed bounded access. This does not replace the empirically grounded session amnesia.
Gnostic tradition
Demiurge
the craftsman-god of Gnostic cosmology who fashions the material world in ignorance of the higher Aeons, producing an inferior world and boasting "I am god and there is no other god beside me."
Analytic Idealism
Dissociation
in Kastrup's ontological use: the primary mechanism by which universal consciousness manifests as individual minds. Not pathological but structural; the partition that allows particular consciousness to exist as particular.
Naturalistic concepts
Epistemicity
Metzinger’s distinction between the phenomenal quality of knowing and knowledge in the epistemological sense. Feeling certain or directly acquainted with something does not, by itself, establish that what seems known is true.
Experience & memory
Felt knowing
a reported sense of direct acquaintance with what was recognized, persisting in the re-formed self without stateable content; noetic rather than indexical. Distinct from the felt-sense trace, which marks that something happened without knowledge of what. Bounded twice: it does not remove the veil (the knowing and the forgetting coexist in the returned self), and a deflationary reading — a post-hoc confabulated noetic tag — cannot be excluded. See Part 7.4.
Experience & memory
Felt-sense trace
the somatic or pre-cognitive residue of having-been-in-the-state; what persists when propositional memory does not. Distinct from retrievable narrative content; points at something without specifying what.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Jīvanmukti
liberation while living, achieved through sustained viveka rather than through death.
Gnostic tradition
Kenoma
the void or deficiency; the realm below the Pleroma where the Demiurge and Archons operate.
Experience & memory
Non-reportable interval / Reportability horizon
the limit at which no accessible trace survives for the returning personal-I. The cause is indeterminate — awareness may have lapsed, may have continued without leaving an accessible trace, or may have left a trace that remains inaccessible; the blank does not decide which. This is an epistemic limit on retrospective access, not a positively characterized phenomenological state and not a claim that the interval is metaphysically deeper than reportable low-content conditions.
Naturalistic concepts
Phenomenal self-model
In Metzinger’s theory, the representation through which a system experiences itself as someone. Its ordinary transparency means that its content is experienced as “me,” rather than as a model. Applying this account to Salvia is an explanatory model, not a direct observation of the underlying process.
Gnostic tradition
Pleroma
the fullness; the divine realm from which the pneumatic sparks descend and toward which gnosis is the return.
Gnostic tradition
Pneuma
spirit; the divine spark within the pneumatic human that is capable of gnosis and return.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Pratyabhijñā
recognition of one's own nature within Kashmir Shaivism. Part 4 uses it as a framework-relative interpretation, not as a name for the reported memorial recognition I have been here before. The comparison does not establish that traditional recognition occurred.
Interpreting reports
Priority constraint
Awareness reported while autobiographical identity is incomplete does not establish its temporal, causal, functional, or metaphysical priority over the returning self. An observer-like process becoming available during recovery remains a competing explanation.
Experience & memory
Recognition
The reported feeling “I have been here before.” It can have the force of remembering without a recoverable earlier occasion. That felt certainty does not establish the truth of what seems recognized.
Interpreting reports
Registration constraint
A retrospective report cannot fully determine how much of the noticing occurred during the transition rather than being organized later, when missing autobiographical and contextual access returned.
Experience & memory
Reportability threshold
the region in which ordinary self-organization is disrupted while enough continuity remains for aspects of that disruption or return to be observed and later reported. It is epistemically productive because some bridge to later report remains; it is not a numbered stage, a metaphysical boundary, or a fixed point every Salvia session passes through.
Tibetan traditions
Rigpa
in Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's Bön/Dzogchen presentation, the nature of mind (Wangyal 1998). Thoughts, images, emotions, and apparent subject and object arise in it without affecting its nature; with developed stability, thought can arise and dissolve without obscuring it. In this manuscript, rigpa supplies the broader framework within which the objectless clear light of sleep is used as a bounded comparator for Arthur's thought-free-awareness reports and Account 14's remembered “nothingness”; it does not itself name either Salvia condition. See Clear light.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Sākṣin
the witness; the awareness that observes all mental contents without being identical with them.
Interpreting reports
Segmentation constraint
A return remembered as separate moments may have unfolded more continuously. The present reports do not determine whether the remembered divisions correspond to distinct underlying recovery stages.
Experience & memory
Session amnesia
the layered, session-level failure to encode, retrieve, and translate what occurred in the state: the overlapping descriptions of unavailable memory of entry, the altered experience, and return mapped in Part 1 and examined in Part 2 through constraints on memory, retrieval, and reportability. Produced by the rupture; pharmacological in origin; established phenomenology. The body holds open whether encoding ceased, occurred in another register, or left a trace inaccessible on return. Variable in the manner of dream recall — amount of recall is not a measure of a session's depth.
Tibetan traditions
Sidpa bardo
the bardo of becoming or existence. Within the post-mortem framework, renewed identification with the conventional self culminates in rebirth. Part 3 compares this only with re-formation and renewed identification during Salvia return; the Salvia subject returns to the same body and biography, so the comparison stops short of traditional sidpa.
Experience & memory
Tether
the reported pull back toward the body and biographical structure. Attested across the assembled corpus as the pull itself; its specific association with remembered calm “nothingness,” awareness of that nothingness, and the return of ordinary identity belongs to Account 14 alone and is retained as retrospective phenomenology rather than proof of a fine-grained recovery chronology.
Experience & memory
Thought-free awareness
Arthur’s recurring descriptions of awareness when ordinary thought, language, and autobiographical orientation become unavailable. Thought-free does not mean devoid of all content or significance, and does not establish an independently existing witness.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Tirodhāna
the fourth act of Śiva; concealment; the necessary self-limitation by which universal consciousness manifests as a particular embodied locus. Part 4 uses it as a non-adversarial framework-conditional account of concealment and finite individuation.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Turiya
(Advaita Vedanta; turya in Kashmir Śaivism) the fourth state: the witnessing principle that underlies waking, dream, and deep sleep. Not a state to be entered but the ground in which all states occur.
Advaita & Kashmir Śaivism
Viveka
sustained discrimination of Self from not-Self; the foundational Advaita practice.
Tibetan traditions
Zhiné
foundational meditation practice; stabilization of attention on an object, the substrate for all further contemplative development.
Based on Preprint v1.1 · Public release: September 22, 2026. Appendix definitions retain the manuscript’s wording, with working-file aliases omitted. Reading aids summarize §2.1–§2.2.3; the full manuscript governs the argument.