Maybe not the meaning of life, but I felt as though I now have a much better grasp on individuality and unity though individual life. Hard to explain.
the plant itself is dried out, smoking the leaves when their dry straight form the plant will not make you trip noticeably (in indian times they would chew on a massive amounts of salvia leaves to attain the effect) So what people do is they extract the Salvinorin-A (what makes you trip) via a propane based extraction (isopropanol, Isopropyl Alcohol, Rubbing Alcohol) this is then evaporated away and youre left with the Salvinorin-A, you then need to purify using naphtha and the cleaned and extracted Salvinorin-A is sprayed back on to regular leaves...
example
-You take 100grams of salvia leaves (not expensive at all since its a regular ass plant)
-Grind/powder all 100 grams
-Dissolve 90 of those grams in the solvent and treat for hours
-Evaporate all the solvent (like if you made ISO hash)
-Clean the extract with naphtha, this will dissolve the plant waxes and leave the Salvinorin A
-Spray the cleaned liquid back on to the remaining 10grams
-Let dry, you now have 10x salvia
So essentially it just means that there is about 10 grams of salvias level of salviainorin in 1 gram of salvia.