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My Ibogaine Experience Options
 
UgraKarma
#1 Posted : 9/9/2023 1:19:57 PM

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Last visit: 25-Apr-2024
On Thursday night of this past week I had an immersive dream, followed by a series of reverberations in the days to come. I’ve recently started keeping a dream journal by my bedside and was able to capture some of its details. A verbatim follows:

During first portion of dream I was in iboga trip… But not my own. I entered trip to show someone around during their experience. Suspended in universe and shown a long windy road represented by circular line (think Mario Kart)...As we walked out into the universe the width of the road appeared to be getting tighter - when in fact the proportions of the universe were getting smaller by comparison to us. Walking along the road, until we reached its end - (at this point it was all “I” and no “we”.) I was larger than the galaxies at the edge of the universe and seemed to be receiving a message that as I travel through the universe the fixed scale that I experience now is simply an illusion of my fixed point in this dimension, and in fact, in a true view, I was just as large… Larger than the universe.

Bear in mind this journal entry was never intended to be shared. But it seems prudent to include, as a bit of a genesis to this text. Without this dream I’d not be likely to be writing this all out now.

And it’s not that this dream was any more important or unusual or profound than any of my other dreams as of late. I’ve been on a bit of a ride when it comes to Big Dreams these days. Journaling helps them to stay sticky in my consciousness, but they’re still slippery. Hard to hold onto.

Unless you can bring them back to real life.

Two days later a friend asked me, quite out of the blue, about some of the details of my experience using ibogaine. I answered the questions to the best of my ability - but then I remembered the dream. And the journal entry. Something seemed to be giving life to this experience I’d had some years ago.

But some other things happened as well. I turned forty today. Not that I place any big deal on these markers in life. Nonetheless, it seems important to make a practice of writing. This struck me as good a milestone as any to establish patterns of productivity and harness creative discipline.

Forty is going well for me, or at least stable - definitely well compared to my placement in the universe prior to, and during my experience with ibogaine. I’d recently lost a well paying job and was back to living with my parents. They saw the absolute worst of me as I struggled through the last legs of my addiction, and I was on a collision course with something - all signs pointed to death. I mention this not to laboriously wax over the horrors of addiction. Maybe I will write that piece some day as well. Instead I want to highlight what separates my experience from the expensive trips to Costa Rica where the user takes hardcore psychedelics in a tropical setting. This is the thoroughly documented tale of the American who takes ibogaine that I’ve read over and over again. That piece already exists. Not to take away from the healing experience of someone else - but it’s important to note that on these ibogaine island getaway tales there lies a subtext that the user is having their revelations on top of a still comfortable purse (or parents purse.) It was my experience that a roaring opioid addiction empties that purse. And then it sells the purse.

I sourced ibogaine on the internet and explained to my mother that I would be detoxing with an illegal African psychotropic. I explained that there was a chance that it might kill me. These are conversations nobody wants to have. But I had to. As previously mentioned, all signs were pointing to death, and whether it was the narcotic drugs I was hooked on or the exotic jungle drug nobody had heard of, it really seemed like a moot point.

Needless to say, I was not in a great place at the time. But I knew I had to.

Some basics on ibogaine seem pertinent. Ibogaine hydrochloride is the synthetic chemical sourced from the iboga plant, which grows in, and is primarily sourced from, Gabon in Africa. For centuries the Bwiti tribe of Gabon have engaged with the iboga plant in a ceremonial fashion, as well as taking low doses for its stimulating effects. Ibogaine, as a drug, seems to modulate most of the brain’s faculties in one way or the next. It engages dopamine receptors, acting like a classic stimulant. It engages NMDA receptors, providing its markedly and most pronounced effect of dissociation. It has serotonergic action which is similar to the more classic hallucinogens such as LSD, mushrooms, or DMT. It also massages opioid receptors, which permits an absence of withdrawals throughout the experience. It even touches the nicotinergic receptors of the brain that tobacco engages with. Its truly a remarkable drug, and as far as I know, the only one that really seems to hit all of the major food groups.

To put it bluntly, ibogaine is strong medicine.

It begins. I pop the first pill. This was an allergy test. 100 milligrams of ibogaine hydrochloride. The Bwiti take a whopping 40 grams of the iboga plant’s rootbark during their initiation rites. But here in the cold childhood bedroom in the dead of winter in Massachusetts, USA, I’m a hardline syntheticist. I’m ready to get to business. I’m sick and there’s work to be done. Within one hour I am buzzing hard. For such a small dose, I’m feeling loaded on something for sure - a slightly euphoric nervous buzz is rippling through me. I’ll need to take ten times this amount in short time. An entire fucking gram. Starting to feel weak from the opiates leaving my system in short order, and seeing what this taste tester is doing to me, it seems like a both comedically absurd and soberingly suicidal dose. I’m in. I’ve committed. And I’ve begun modestly playing with the real possibility that I might die from this type of power-dosing. However, and possibly the sole notion that allowed me to continue on - cowardice still seemed like a worse fate than death.

Second dose. 500 milligrams. I take it and wait. An hour passes and I can hardly walk. When I try to use the bathroom the force which holds my body together lets go of my legs. It becomes clear to me now that there is some type of Spirit, some immaterial life force, and that Spirit is what truly holds the body together. Not just an anatomical machine system. And it is now also clear that this Spirit is taking a back seat, letting go of my body for the time being - like there was an agreement. And Iboga has taken over. Hijacked. My heart rate is slowing to a very irregular, slow, pounding thud. Not my usual heart rate at all. My internal clock has been displaced - I am now on iboga time. I’m suddenly reminded that the brain produces only the second most powerful electrical charge in the body, following the heart. The power plant. And I am being switched on with a running, pulsing sensation, like thick electrical current. Something is taking over the signal. There’s a second party, and they have decided to rewire things according to their own frequency. I breathe deeply. Feeling dizzy. This is a charged, full surge experience.

Ibogaine produces a wide swath of visual phenomenon. Some of the visuals are quite unique to the experience. Most hallucinogens produce trails, or a tracer effect. It’s arguably the most common and shared visual one is likely to have. With mushrooms or LSD there’s a distinct trailing of an object in motion, a smooth visual remnant of the object as its transparency passes through view. Ibogaine also produces this phenomenon, however it is of an entirely different character. It is sharp and abrupt, a slicing of the visual field. Hard shuttering where the moving object can leave behind whole fragments of the moving image, without the blur and dissipation in opacity more common to serotonergic psychedelics. I found this to be quite the obstacle to keeping my eyes open at all really - when trying to go to the bathroom, I’d noticed that they were quite fierce. These coarse ibogaine tracers, which become pronounced in even the slightest of light, make seeing anything a funhouse mirror exercise in disorientation.

The other feature of my bathroom trip which was quite disturbing was the sudden refusal of my legs to agree with the movements specified by my brain. As previously mentioned, the Spirit no longer seemed to be working as a switchboard operator between the different components of my biological ecosystem, It's not that they simply lost control or went dead. I would take a step or two feeling fine, and my heart would begin pounding, I could almost hear a hollow, staccato drumming as a distinct feeling of brooding intensity wound up inside me. And my legs gave out completely, but in the oddest way. I felt as if I were a marionette, whose puppeteer suddenly decided to make walking troublesome. My legs jimmied at the knees to the left and to the right, my feet barely keeping up with the monotone tom drumming that ran through me. In reflection it makes the most sense for me to consider the possibility that during the ibogaine experience whatever phenomenon was directing the event indeed became puppeteer of my body, and toyed with me when I resisted doing what needed to be done for its work to take place: laying down and not getting up for a very long time.

Final dose. The Flood.

There are three general sets of dosing common with iboga. Tier 1 is called microdosing or booster dosing. It is stimulating and hallucinogenic, without question a full on drug experience in and of itself. The next stage is the psychospiritual dose. This may be akin to a heavy ayahuasca experience in its level of incapacitating the user, and having its way, beating down the subject with its power. And then the tier after that, the third tier, is the Flood. Post-beatdown, this is the stage of dosing just prior to the very unfortunate fourth tier, overdosing/death. It’s awful close actually. And my how the Flood seems too apt a naming convention for this stage. It is almighty and apocalyptic in its force. It is a total end of worlds and allows for new beginnings.

I took the remaining 400 milligrams and waited for the waters to start wading into the streets.

And then the worst happened. I was in bed and I was not out of withdrawals. The disoriented cuckoo clock of my resyncopated heartbeat was ferocious, but the maniacal restless leg demons crawling through every inch of me were just as fierce. Things were getting dicey. Did I just take an inordinate amount of some obscure jungle juice extraction and set myself up to have a hallucination bender on top of and through my withdrawal hellscape?

Sweat. Tension. Toss. Turn. I’m about to scream.

I’ve thought about the events that transpired next in hundreds of ways since that night. Asking myself questions like “is this what all the schizophrenics go on and on about?” and “Why did the universe choose to reveal some of its more intimate workings to me at this time, while feeling I’m at my most undeserving, my lowest?” I’ve come to think that the hard-headed atheist sweating it out in his childhood bed who never would have believed otherwise. Never would have believed the transmissions that were coming through, unable to truly accept them for what they were, blessings beyond fact - a truth outside of time

The door opens. An angel stands before me.

At the threshold to my room was what looked to be a tall woman. A flowing off-white cotton dress was covered at the chest by the type of breastplate one would wear during battle. A soft candle-hued aura allowed her to softly glow and fix my gaze. Behind her back, as you can likely imagine, were enormous wings, the length of most of her body, whose feathers may have been the length of my forearm.

Perhaps most interesting to me both at the time and in my notions of that night which followed is that this was not what I’d been prepared for. I’d taken heavy duty psychedelics before. Previously I’d even met hypercolor beings and was taken to immaterial fractal realms during tryptamine ekstasis, but there was always a holographic unreality to those types of visions. My angel standing in the doorway held none of those psychovisual tropes. This was as real as real life.

But let’s not forget the set. Tense. Sweating. Tossing. Turning. While there is very much an angel watching over me, I’m still crawling out of my skin and ready to scream.

Writhing and kicking the blankets off my legs my heart is pounding. The angel makes her way towards me. Restlessness has reached a fever pitch and something simply has to break. Just as I am about to scream the angel reaches out and puts her hand on my leg. I am now convinced this is the moment I will die.

The angel gives voice to a caringly stern directive: “You need to stop - RIGHT NOW.”

I am immediately out of all withdrawals. Total and absolute relief.

It always seems as though the most valuable things we pick up along the way were never intended. When the car breaks down on a vacation and the perfect view, the one that is etched into the memory, later defining the vacation, it occurs during that miserable walk home. On this night my perfect view that I can never forget became the Mystery. The voice, the thread pulling the fabric together, it's really impossible for me to articulate still, yet it remains the most important. What did become clear to me during this ride was that there was some greatness, some intelligence, and some beyond. Beyond the moment, and as such beyond time. Beyond where we are now, where I was then, and beyond any place. Beyond the body and beyond the atoms that make it up. Beyond the bright white stars and beyond the black body of nothing with which they are cradled. A beyond that was also beyond itself. Yet it wasn’t somewhere else - it penetrated my every thought. So far beyond that it had my specific muscle tensions memorized and my most gated thoughts booked and studied. At times it seemed as though Nature was the adequate term for this Mystery. I’ve also tried to use the common God format and naming convention to help understand what I was interfacing with. None ever seem wholly adequate after enough consideration, so I will continue to refer to it as the Mystery. At least for now. Maybe getting this all out will support me in defining something so grand. Infinity gets close - but infinity seems like a measurement. And measurements don’t have a sense of humor.

Ibogaine has a distinct impact on some very familiar systems to even those readers without psychedelic experience. Ibogaine directly displays itself in a fidelity quite similar to the dream state (with the possible distinction of experiencing it inside of one’s forehead more palpably.) But if ibogaine rattles any one system more than all else, it is memory. Sequences play out in repetition, in real life. Moments you’ve lived through, before, replay themselves and you replay out within them, or maybe just observe them. But it’s more than that - you remember what the real you is. And the real you has a voice that’s driving you that’s always told you to go for it. Ibogaine lets you remember this voice that’s somehow been suppressed by abuse or offense or fear or absence or whatever has silenced the voice inside the user. Ibogaine gives you a transmission devoid of interference to this voice inside you - and this conversation with your true self that’s happening - I’m just going to call that the “Iboga Spirit”.

I close my eyes and begin my voyage through the Flood. The first thing I notice is a gentle cascading mist. The mist seems to gain in visual momentum, growing into deep red pixels dancing against the blackness behind my eyelids. These dots slowly congregate and flock together, now appearing as a pointillist red lattice. It dances like a Ben Day veil blowing in the breeze. And I’m suddenly experiencing motion, I am being pulled down into anesthesia with the sense of being submerged deeper and further down into some never ending recess both within and beyond myself. The crimson dots continuing to dance and lure me deeper. And within the point pattern, curtain twisting and rising, a face emerges. It is a guardian warrior constellated by hundreds of small red stars lighting up the blackness of space behind my eyes. Very much a keeper at the threshold in every capacity. We converse telepathically, and with ease. It does indeed feel as though some agreement is being made. Notions of “you must understand that you’re taking this course now, you’re going in”, though to be truthful I cannot remember the specifics of my banter with this threshold keeper. I would not know at the time, but we would meet many times throughout the course of this Flood night.

With a final nod I move past the red-pixelated face, all of the its dotted outlines are now gone, replaced by a literal night sky. I’m no longer inside my head making agreements with the warrior. I’m now out in an extremely dark field, beneath the most perfect starry sky. Coordinating myself I look down from the sky to realize that this field I am in, I’m very there. I’m as there as I am typing this out at my desk now. And within this field I see silhouettes moving behind the black shadow of unlit trees. Everything in this landscape has that peculiar quality of varying shades and dimensions and densities of blackness, as does looking at leaves on a tree in the thick of night. The inhabitants of this landscape also seemed to have this same issue for me - while I can most certainly see them fumbling their way through the dark, the details are lost to the blackness of the night lit only by the perfectly unpolluted stars from above. And as I watched their movements, working through the darkness, I could only feel that they too were other souls in the midst of their very own journeys with ibogaine, or whatever else might have brought them onto into this landscape. With nothing to find besides their way through the dark, I did not reach out - everyone was clearly attending to their own very busy work.

Like the warrior figure who I’d engage countless times, I would also return to this landscape. The thick of the ibogaine experience lasts upwards of fourteen hours, and there would be plenty of opportunities for me to return here.

I close my eyes and am passed through to a room of comfort and wonder. This is the office space of a very old collector. An antiquey private museum of knick knacks and doo dads. Everything glows with a quiet warmth. It is bordering on cluttered, but everything seems to be in its place, and I feel as though I could spend a lifetime checking out the tchotchkes.

I walk over to an old world globe, with a hard patina. Mapped with a geography of the world that’s been corrected and outdated, the relic has my attention. As I begin to take a closer look I am instantly no longer in the old timey curiosities shop. I am now driving through city streets in the backseat of a car in the 1980s. Different images slice from the scene in black and white as if torn from a newspaper page. The car is being driven by my grandmother. And as we drive by the homeless people she tells me that they’re there because of mistakes they’ve made. Newspaper photo. Black and white. An image of a destitute broken homeless woman on the streets. But now with a more firmer grasp of economic hardship and the societal injustices entwined within, I no longer identify with the child in the backseat of the car. I see him nodding in agreement to the absolute truths of his grandmother, and realize that this is where beliefs I had were seeded and perverted the infinite empathy and love I was born with. Ding.

And I am back in the cabinet of curiosities. The globe was simply a mechanism to pull me into a tier of deeper dreamtime. And I come to realize that the space I am in is the connecting station for me to access parts of myself, and how I came to be how I was.

I pick up the snowglobe and am brought down into a deeper level. A passage through myself sitting under the kitchen table while the adults talk. I look into a solid gold kaleidoscope on the desk. Another vignette plays out revealing some hidden truth about me I’ve always known. Every paperweight, every toy I examine allows me to progress into a further circle of me.

Its hard for me to recall individual perceptions that completely allowed me to rethink the way I see the world. Beautiful views of snowcapped mountains overlooking French beaches were definitely beautiful, but I’d seen them in postcards - corroborated my view of what I’d previously been told was the type of beautiful nature. Particularly poetic pink sunsets will have a narcotic effect on me at times, but with a little distance buffered by a few other sunsets they quickly become less particular. Because of my sensitivity to the light from the ibogaine I was in fact going out of my way to stop from seeing anything - the blacker the better. While all lights were out for at least an hour in my room it was time to throw on the sleep mask. But here’s the problem - the sleep mask seemed a little thin. I could still make out the room relatively clearly. How annoying. I pulled my sheets over my head as an additional layer of blindfolding. Still, I see my closet quite perfectly. I begin ruminating on how my sensitivity to light is somehow piercing all of these various layers of fabric between my eyes and the room around me. What an odd phenomena indeed. Finally I put my hands over my eyes and squinting them closed, being certain to cup my hands just so perfectly as to prevent any and all light to break through. And still, I see my room as clear as day. And then my eyes begin to wander. I can see one wall of my room and suddenly am able to see the staircase on the other side of it. I’m seeing the pitch black hallway without any issue. So here I am - in my bed with the sheets over my head, blindfolded, with hands over my closed eyes, and yes - I’m experiencing the most clear and perfect vision I’ve ever seen with - right through the wall and into the rest of the house. And I begin to ruminate on this. Suddenly I’m starting to constellate what makes up what I thought vision was made up from - lights, rods, cones. It was all wrong. I can see so much farther than that, right through objects in fact, effortlessly. I just needed to look the right way. And to this is the type of thing ibogaine does. It makes the impossible happen, so squarely in front of you, that it forces you to reconsider the human mind, how it creates and correlates how we see and exist through this world. And it changes what we see, if only for a short time, but so significantly, and so profoundly, that you can’t go back to considering the world the way you did the day before. Such a small shift really, the notion that “if the mind is modulated ever so slightly a man can see right through solid objects clear as day.” And it was this little individual perception, and just a fair tweak to how I would normally experience, that by just looking a little deeper, everything I knew about man and his relationship to the world was fundamentally changed.

And there most certainly is a sense of direction in this dreamtime. My threshold red dot doorman is at the surface. Plunging deeper I reach the dark wilderness with the other wanderers. Deeper still is the patina room of knick knacks. There’s an element of rabbit-holing, it seems I have to peek into my current interest with some intent before you start tumbling into the next scene. And each time I wake from a vignette I’m likely to return to the setting prior. I am beginning to follow the architecture and am grounded by a sense of navigability within the spaces.

The sense of direction is not only applicable to the plunging through various consciousness ecosystems. Sometimes I would come up for air and find myself back in the bedroom, quite dazed, but wholly there. Additionally, when I’d returned to the surface the concept of time had been completely hacked. And I was provided another teleogical paradigm shift associated with the mechanics of time.

When I’d sourced ibogaine for use in my parents home I was without the warm South American breeze that accompanies most of the Floods one is likely to read about. This is how most white Americans and Europeans take ibogaine after all. As tourists. Sadly, that warm breeze was simply out of reach of what my finances would allow. In addition to the missing breeze I would also forego the bedside nursing staff and life support facilities that most users who take such high doses require. However, my younger sister, Rachel, was a young psych nurse, and agreed to do the needful for her broken older brother, being the kind spirit that she is. Throughout the evening Rachel periodically monitored my heart rate and blood pressure, and applied careful judgment once those began exceeding our agreed-upon red zones (after all, there’s quite literally nothing a hospital could have done for me anyways.)

But I’m losing the thread. Fast forward to me coming out of a longer trip sequence. I open my eyes and notice I am in the room alone. Then after only a beat or two Rachel walks in with a glass of water. She laughs and says “how are you doing brother?” I blink my eyes. I realize Rachel absolutely is not in the room at the moment, and the experience that I’d just witnessed was in fact a memory. I felt hypersensitive to the component of my brain used for this type of retrieval, but remained confused as I simply couldn’t remember the initial instance with which this memory of my sister walking into the room occurred. Even more interestingly, this was a live action memory - almost dreamlike, however I was very much in the room and there was no break between the modes of consciousness between this recall experience and my current headspace. And I’m definitely not in another dream motif - my physical symptoms are too palpable for that. I determine that I lived out the memory - another novel characteristic of the ibogaine, for sure. I blink again. I am in the room alone.

Rachel walks in with a glass of water. She laughs. I know what she is going to say next.

“How are you doing brother?”

Suddenly I am suspended in awe. Living out real time memory sequences was far out. Way far out in fact. Some of the most interesting psychedelic phenomenology I’d yet to experience. However, I knew that I’d pulled this sequence out from recall. But most important, most astonishing -

I remembered this sequence of events in advance of their taking place in front of me.

My grasp on the concept of time recoils. I am fundamentally gutted in offense to this revelation. I’d had it all wrong. Just as seeing through the walls of the house earlier had renovated my understanding on how the mind takes in visual data, my framework for how we receive sequential data (the ever-unfolding storyline of our lives) was all wrong.

Nothing is obfuscated. Nothing is unavailable to us. The only thing stopping us from seeing around the neighborhood and recalling what we make for dinner tomorrow is our own blocks we create for ourselves. The mind fashions these blinders just as the horse wears his, getting to the destination is less distracting that way. But it's all there. It all always is.

An important distinction between the effects of ibogaine and those presented by the more classical psychedelics is the direction in which the momentum of the whole enterprise is headed. The classic hallucinogens seem to open your mind, right out of the top of your head. For a sense of cartology, if we were to place them at a chakra it’s opening up your crown chakra. You are pushing your consciousness to explore something clearly directed higher. If those classic hallucinogens take you up, than it only makes sense to define ibogaine as a Spirit that takes you deep down, and would perhaps best be plotted as a byline from the Anahata, heart chakra, that burrows deep down into the basement of the root chakra. And you begin to realize that this experience, all of its wonder, it is all already inside of you. And that it’s only taken you until now, dancing with the ibogaine, to realize that every strand of your DNA has capacities and memories long forgotten, trying to surface themselves despite your own gating attempts.

Interior. A minimal dark gray warehouse space. There’s some machines sparsely scattered about. I take a closer view. One appears to be a pinball machine. Next to it a basketball hoop atop a ramp with a digital counter. I intuit skeeball is around the corner. I am in an arcade of sorts.

Three characters enter. They are disheveled and appear not to have been taking care of their hygiene or sleep. The character in the middle, leading the pack, points to one of the machines.

He says “I’ve tried every single one of these, but this one is the strongest.” He continues, I say “well we came all this way” and point to the arcade game ride. Wait, who was that? Was he talking or was that me?

And then it makes complete sense. In the segue he is me. I am him. And I want to try this machine, I’ve come a long way for it, apparently.

“It’s called The Shocker. It’s the wildest ride in the country. They say that people have died on this ride.”

I take a closer look and only realize the game I’ll be playing as I am ascending the step to sit on it. This is an electric chair. There is a green, yellow, and red LED meter that runs alongside it. A sense of dread overcomes me, but my unshaven face that is my first person player is grinning ear to ear. The two companions I am with strap me in. A carnival barker appears from the shadows of the warehouse and begins to give details about the ride as he ensures my straps are so tight I would not be able to escape should I come to my senses.

He grins menacingly. “We’ll start low”

A thudding electrical charge sounds and a dull excruciating electrical pulse goes through my body. This is already the most pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.

“You wanna go higher?”

I don’t remember responding but he turns up the pulse. It is already peaking into the red on the meter. My jaw snaps closed. My body shakes. Every muscle clenched.

I don’t think I was asked about the next escalation. I knew what was coming. Maximum charge. In the split second before the meter peaks into the maximum capacity red it all makes sense. This is my addiction. My need for extremes. My need for risk taking. A laissez faire policy toward my own mortality in the interest of cheap thrills. I seek out this type of torture, and have been putting quarters into the machine for years now.

Full throttle. The room begins to shake and my vision blurs. Screaming tinnitus blasts through my ears and the harrowing pulse of the chair's discharge seems to bend light and gravity around my pain. It’s exactly what I wanted. This is death. I’m dying. I’m dying in the most painful and public and idiotic way one can imagine. The newspapers will read “local idiot gets in an electric chair and dies, expectedly.” My family will read this. The meter explodes.

Everything goes black.

I am falling back in. Past the red pixel gatekeeper. Through the eigengrau forest with its pitch black inhabitants. Picking up something in the antiquey room. Perhaps the magnifying glass? I can’t recall.

I am now in a scene with a native american chief. Now mind you - my dream dialogue was not and is not with the times. Unable to keep with the trends of informed identification and without apropos to the appropriateness of cultural markers - I began my next journey with a tall native american chief, who - I must be candid, truly appeared to be cut from a mid-20th century tobacco advertisement. He spent a great deal of time discussing my relationship to the Earth, and to plants especially. Really honing in on the fact that this is a single organism, this whole life business, of which I’m a small entity dependent on other small entities also dependent on me. He explained that his people had a relationship to plants and earth that was the beginning, middle, and end of all human struggles - and he belabored the point that to understand this relationship is vital to save mankind from itself. This was a long detailed walk through the miracle of life that only the messenger sent directly from Nature herself could deliver. This was the point of the trip. This is what I’d come for.

And now, I was told, it was my turn to ask a question. (continued...)
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -lovecraft
 

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UgraKarma
#2 Posted : 9/9/2023 1:23:15 PM

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Certain that I have access to the everything and anything I asked the most important question I could possibly muster in the moment.

“So what’s the point of all of this? Why? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do? How do I get better at what I’m not sure I’m supposed to be doing?”

I was really taking advantage of my one question. Spamming whatever comes to mind out without proper consideration. But maybe I’d get to know.

The chief pointed up above his head. Three green arrows appeared above his finger where he was pointing. Three green arrows, circling each other, a little larger than the size of his head. Opaque and two dimensional. Spinning in the air. Three green arrows that fed into each other that could only be;

“A recycling logo? The purpose of life is a recycling logo?”

The chief nodded which effectively conveyed his sentiment that “well, yes, a recycling logo, and recycling is a part of that, but it's a symbol, and it's much, much more than that” - but the nod was more eloquent and poetic and stern and well, chief-like mechanism of getting all of that across to me.

To this day I continue to ruminate on the importance of this recycling logo. In some of my more esoteric studies I’d seen the same symbol to represent the interplay of Nature, Reality, and Truth. And this makes sense to me. However, it did come directly from an extensive spirit guide diatribe on the importance of harmony between man and plant. There were also a triptych of arrows, all feeding into each other. Perhaps this was an explanation of the Trinity one hears so much about in Sunday School?

I’m still wrestling with that to this day. However, I have nothing but total conviction that the meaning to life can be decoded from this symbol, and I suspect I’ll continue to work through that for the rest of my days.



The day that follows in the wake of the Flood is commonly referred to as the Gray Day. While no longer in the throes of immense DreamTime, the subject remains moderately incapacitated. Eating food is still far from possible, and the body is generally weak and torn from what feels like a night at battle. Similar to how the fireworks display of the first night forces the user to lay down all resistance to the experience, the Gray Day imposes a clear and quiet state of zen onto the user, with a deep and earthy clarity. There’s little else for one to do beyond meditations on the Flood. It truly is review time, and while more sober and reserved, the day is one of learning and contemplation.

I recall listening to classical music with the blinds halfway closed in a mental still between bouts of trying to work out just what I’d in fact went through the night prior. Maybe it was Brahms. Arvo Part? I’ve found myself writing much of this article to Part. It seems to capture the somber reverence I experienced in the wake of my Flood better than anything else.

My gray day was one of total remark. I was not in withdrawals. I had no desire to run out and find opiates. Would this last? Could I retain this space between myself and the demons who brought me here?

Six years later, as I sit and write this all out, it is certainly starting to look like that may be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -lovecraft
 
downwardsfromzero
#3 Posted : 9/9/2023 10:50:20 PM

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I scrolled up through your two posts and thought "oh no, not another wall of text!"

But then I started reading.

This was the single most gripping piece of writing I've read in a very long time. Your imagery transported me the whole way through without pause and now, as I write this response, I too feel as though I'm transformed. This was your Meisterwerk and I hope you write a whole lot more. Thus I offer you my heartfelt thanks for your deeply moving piece of creativity, your slice of truth. Crying or very sad Love

Now we've got that bit over and done with - there were some rather interesting subjective experiences that you described. The one where the walls (not to mention all the rest) became transparent was highly reminiscent of more or less the same thing happening to me under the influence of ketamine - this possibly suggests it relates to the NMDA receptors, where the action of ibogaïne and ketamine intersect. Yet somehow talk of neuroreceptors in the context of iboga seems like missing the point.

Another thing that really stood out was the nonlinear time experience - or anterograde recollection, if you will. My own parallel to this that particularly sprang to mind occurred while sleeping, or at least as a hypnopompic (waking) phenomenon, and it also involved sound (albeit not speech). I had dozed off while waiting for a friend to pick me up one evening when I heard his car draw up outside and stop. The door of the car opened and shut, and then the garden gate - one of those sounds that gets seared into one's awareness over the years.

Thinking my friend had arrived, I woke up somewhat abruptly and laid there in the dark for several breaths, amounting to a good minute or so, when my friend arrived in his car and the exact same sequence of sounds occured to the the precise same timing. This was enough of a shock for me to be able to recall it vividly to this day. Bringing it back to the iboga, I'm thinking these kinds of phenomena may link into the cholinergic (nicotine-like - although tbh these are more atropine/scopolamine-like) action of the iboga that you mention.

So, thank you once more for this incredible piece of writing, and congratulations too with your six years clean.




“There is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call 'a field of force'. The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work."
― Jacques Bergier, quoting Fulcanelli
 
strtman
#4 Posted : 9/11/2023 4:21:06 PM

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I agree with downwardsfromzero. This is an excellent report. Thank you.

After reading it, I was thinking, there is changa as a smokeable form of ayahuasca.

Can you smoke ibogaine in one way or another? Just wondering.

Quiet the mind and the soul will speak
 
UgraKarma
#5 Posted : 9/11/2023 8:16:51 PM

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downwardsfromzero wrote:

This was the single most gripping piece of writing I've read in a very long time. Your imagery transported me the whole way through without pause and now, as I write this response, I too feel as though I'm transformed. This was your Meisterwerk and I hope you write a whole lot more. Thus I offer you my heartfelt thanks for your deeply moving piece of creativity, your slice of truth. Crying or very sad Love


Wow thanks so much for both your time reading and the wonderful words. Truly flattered. It took me six years to even get this far in documenting it, so your encouragement means a whole lot.

downwardsfromzero wrote:
Now we've got that bit over and done with - there were some rather interesting subjective experiences that you described. The one where the walls (not to mention all the rest) became transparent was highly reminiscent of more or less the same thing happening to me under the influence of ketamine - this possibly suggests it relates to the NMDA receptors, where the action of ibogaïne and ketamine intersect. Yet somehow talk of neuroreceptors in the context of iboga seems like missing the point.



Now this is precisely why I come to the Nexus. I too have considered that the overlap between the effects profile of ibogaine and other NMDA antagonists / glutamate modulators - in my experience these all seem to work with and make plastic the concept of time and/or memory, which if we allow ourselves to expand from a bit, might offer additional insight into this xray phenomena? To take it a bit further - it seems like this class is all "inward-facing" compounds (whereas I would considers trymptamines outward facing.) Just dreaming out loud here. But - I agree this indeed is an angle I'd like to weave into my narrative here somehow. I'll need to chew on it for a bit.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -lovecraft
 
UgraKarma
#6 Posted : 9/11/2023 8:18:41 PM

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strtman wrote:

I agree with downwardsfromzero. This is an excellent report. Thank you.

After reading it, I was thinking, there is changa as a smokeable form of ayahuasca.

Can you smoke ibogaine in one way or another? Just wondering.


Thank you for your time and attention, as well as for the kind words.. As far as I know there's no effects from smoking, and because of the size of dose required, wouldn't think it'd be a practical mode of ingestion.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -lovecraft
 
clearlyone
#7 Posted : 9/12/2023 2:36:29 AM

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An excellent read. Thanks so much for sharing UgraKarma.

Your experience of space and time was supportive of conclusions I’ve made from rather different experiences I’ve had. … Of our everyday mind being a limiting activity of consciousness; limiting our experience of space to something local and pushing other experiences away to other “spaces” - and causing us to feel as if we balance between past and future, spreading events out across time.

Be well. And if it’s close to an even six years, Happy Birthday - again!
"Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling, and knowing, they don't perceive the radiance of the source. If they could eliminate all conceptual thinking, this source would appear, like the sun rising through the empty sky and illuminating the whole universe." - Huang Po
 
dragonrider
#8 Posted : 9/17/2023 10:47:22 PM

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You write beautifully, and what an epic story!!

To comment on DFZ: i have found that iboga does indeed have something in common with ketamine. But ketamine for some reason impairs the normal thought processes much more than iboga does.

It also has something in common with N2O, wich as you might know is also an NMDA antagonist. But compared to these two substances, iboga is rather clear-headed.
I have no experience with MXE, but there's an MXE analogue called DMXE, and that one comes even closer to iboga. It is also relatively clear headed, and i believe it also acts as very mild mu-opioid agonist, and an SSRI as well, like noribogaine, so that could have something to do with it. DMXE is also more visual than ketamine.

But iboga is still pretty unique. The most i ever did was something like 15 grams of rootbark, wich is pretty powerfull, but a full flood dose is i think starting from somewhere around 20 grams, up to even 30.

What i have experienced though, is that the other effects start kicking in when the dose is increased. With anything below 5 grams of rootbark, you don't experience the full spectrum of effects, but the more you take, the more the full spectrum unfolds. 10 grams is radically different from 5 grams. And with 15 grams, yet another layer is added. It has some of the effects of salvia as well at higher doses, and also of rue or caapi. And it is remarkable how it can reactivate old memories, maybe because of the AChE inhibiting effects.

But 10 grams of rootbark is quite like something like 60 mg of DMXE. I don't know why ketamine is so much more confusing and sedating. Maybe increased levels of serotonin counteract some of the sedating effects of NMDA antagonism?
 
Exitwound
#9 Posted : 9/18/2023 4:19:28 PM

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Thank you for sharing this experience

Truely enjoyed reading it
 
 
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