So I’ve been talking about it and on this Thursday just gone, I did it. And now it’s time to write it up.
Background
I first heard about iboga during a radio interview with Bruce Parry, talking about his experience taking it with the Bwiti in Gabon. A number of things struck me about what he said: that it was a really positive experience; that it seemed to be a tool for personal and spiritual growth; that he was able to relive past experiences and gain a greater understanding from them; and that he was able to relive events in which he had affected others from their viewpoint. I think it was this last one that I found most profound: not only did it seem incredibly useful, it also tallied with some of what I believe takes place after death – the so-called ‘day of judgment’ – when one reviews one’s own life and gets to see where we did well, and where we fell short. Of course, there is no judgment in the sense of punishment – just an accounting, and a realisation of where one can do better next time around. It seemed to me that Parry had touched on this experience while still in the body. I thought, well there’s something I’d like to do too. I read up on it, I looked into flights to Gabon, and then I more or less put it into the back of my mind for three or four years, the idea of iboga surfacing only intermittently until earlier this year, when I found a few places that sold it in Europe.
My reasons for taking iboga
A lot of people take iboga in an attempt to break free from some sort of chemical addiction – heroin, alcohol, tobacco, etc – and it reportedly has a very high success rate in this regard. In my case I saw it as a means in which to develop my spiritual connection and to try to move beyond certain emotional blockages which I had been aware of for a long time, but which I hadn’t been able to overcome. Also, I have felt that lately I had become way too obsessed with the computer, with being online, and in particular in playing internet chess (!). And I suppose I had hoped it would help me to perhaps be a little less lazy, and to stop procrastinating so much with the multitude of writing projects that I long to do and yet avoid like the plague, for one reason or another. The main reason, though, was that I felt that I had an issue which stems from very early childhood, and in particular to do with my mother, which has left me with a deep down feeling of being unloved, or maybe even unlovable. Rationally, it makes no sense, and I’m not saying it’s a black and white thing, a hundred percent issue one way or the other, but it’s there, and I can see how it affects me in such subtle ways. Explicitly, many moons ago when I was living a fairly intense stage of ‘the spiritual life’ I felt that I had run into a brick wall, that I couldn’t deepen my practice any further: a friend who did these pretty awesome angel channeling readings told me that it was because of issues stemming from my childhood, that because I did not get the feeling of being wanted and loved by my birth mother, I could not accept that I was truly wanted and loved by The Divine Mother (ie, God). It made sense, and I strove to overcome it, and yet I could not. This was more than ten years ago. I also saw how it was affecting me in my relationships with women and given that I was getting ready to embark on a new one, I really wanted this sorted. Iboga seemed like a way to maybe get to the root cause of the issue – if you’ll pardon the pun.
