(and comments about the Indra iboga product)
(Jan ’00)
[Site owner’s note: For this experience Xavier took well above the recommended dose of the Indra iboga extract and had a major visionary experience. Before doing the same, as some who have read this account have done, it might be worth considering the following. Firstly, that major visionary experiences with ibogaine usually only occur when there is a high degree of emotional trauma present within. The situations experienced represent symbolically the nature of the trauma or the choices an individual has to deal with it. Secondly, I last heard from Xavier in early 2000. He told me he was going to do another major session and I never heard from him again. I don’t know if he’s well or not, alive or dead, and if anyone does I would be grateful if they could contact me – Nick.]
First a few words for sceptic people: all the following is true. I haven’t invented or exagerated a detail in this testimony. I spent the last two days writing and translating this report and I carefully chose every word or sentence to be the nearest possible from truth. I am not a fool, I am not drunk or under control of any drug. I am lucid and feel extremely well, thank you! I just want to describe for this list what really and precisely happened to me. I don’t care if some people may find this foolish, if it could help some others.
So let’s go:
On Monday 24 January I started my third eboga trip, with Indra’s extract. [Indra, a Danish group, supply iboga rootbark extract believed to be approx one fifth the strength of pure ibogaine]
It remained 10 grams of it. As I doubted the strength of the extract after my girlfriend’s negative experience, as well as after reading Marko’s analysis report on this list, I had foreseen to take a superior quantity of it to the one counseled on Indra’s site. Otherwise I knew from experience that the psychological defenses that kept doors of my unconscious have always been extremely heavy and powerful, I felt therefore that I would need a strong dose to obtain the results I was attempting for. So I ingested 7,5 grams in gel caps, and kept within reach two caps containing the remaining 2,5 grams, to swallow them later in the event that I would feel the necessity of it.
Before going in the detail of what occurred during my trip, it seems to me useful to take stock on what took place since my last ibo experience toward half October 1999. And to better understand the whole of what is discussed in this new report, it is not maybe useless that you read or read again the report of my first two experiences published on Nick’s site in English either: https://ibogaine.co.uk/exp9.htm or in French: https://ibogaine.co.uk/exp10.htm
Therefore, at the end of my second trip I was quite distressed. Indeed the ibogaine had permitted me to get rid of important and painful problems, but had brought back to my conscience bad sensations and extremely negative emotions buried before in the “black hole”, that had not been solved and with which I had to live henceforth. In some words, I would summarize the state where I was by terms of despair, absolute sadness, total absence of desires or joy, and very numerous, violent and attractive temptations of suicide.
My reflex was first of all to fight against this extremely laborious and dangerous state. But very quickly I remembered the path browsed since the beginning of my psychotherapy, and to what point the primal therapy, whose essential principle is to stop fighting against his emotions or negative mental states but unlike to dive in them to feel them better, to understand them and so to make ripen them to solve them as one picks a mature fruit or as it naturally falls, I remembered how much this principle of action had helped me to progress and to solve lots of problems and traumas. I conclude that in place to fight against my state, I needed to accept it, to assume this again as a new stage of my therapy. Accurately when I had accepted to assume all these negative feelings, to let them express and invade me, it appeared me that I was effectively advancing in my curative process since I perceived quickly that in fact I was inside the “black hole”: all these sensations were associated to states and memories going up again to the very early years of my childhood, right inside of the Pandora’s box, at the ultimate source of my problems and my sufferings. All these things were simply going up again to the surface thanks to the ibogaine, that had made exploded my defenses and had permitted me beginning to open some of the deepest and most secret doors of my mind to probe darkness inside. Therefore, on this point of view my first two ibo trips were not only essential for what they brought me directly at the time, but also because they permitted me to advance thereafter while continuing my recovery work . Thus everything that arrived me seemed at the same time to me extremely laborious and dangerous, but also absolutely necessary and I tempted no more to avoid this but on the contrary to “set it free” most possible. Therefore, from half October to half January, I lived three difficult but fertile months where I learned, understood and deepened a lot of things, where an important psychological evolution took place in me. Physically I had to undergo numerous psycho-somatic demonstrations, essentially of three orders: headaches, stomachaches and repetitive herpes crisis.
There were two important positive notes however in all this stuff. First of all the fact that the extremely painful pressure which I felt inside my skull before the first taken of ibogaine, and that this one seemed to have deleted, had really completely disappeared since my return. The second positive point was that I felt more and more distinctly and strongly, as time went by, that my next taken of ibogaine would be essential -and it was.
It is therefore in this state of mind that I swallowed Indra’s extract toward noon, on empty stomach, with just two or three sips of water. I felt ready, confident, determined -and ripe. The first effects occurred very quickly, about 1/2 hour later. Then they evolved very slowly and moderately. At the end of a few hours, it always didn’t happen much things in me: quite a lot of pleasant visions in 2D, some in 3D, all this stuff was sympathetic and kind but hardly deep. Visual effects like phosphenes or lightnings when I opened my eyes were also very light. I didn’t have any body uneasiness, no vomitting at all.
Four to five hours after having ingested the product, I didn’t have the sensation that things evolved, effects of the extract seemed to me insufficient, so I swallowed the remaining 2,5 grams. Approximately one hour after, I felt propelled higher, stronger, and then appeared real 3D visions with important and numerous personal aspects. It was the beginning of an extremely long trip, which structure and content were very different from the first two ones. There were not well defined stages, except a very long episode (that seemed me to last an indefinite time: days, weeks, months or years -I don’t know because I had lost all time notion then, time notion didn’t exist anymore, this one seemed to have stretched endlessly).
This episode was absolutely extraordinary and put in stage, as usually iboga does, on a symbolic visual way: in my internal vision field appeared something that nearly resembled to the Windows 98 Explorer, with on the left the content of the hard drive, accessible in all its structure. On the right side of screen was a part permitting to visualize in detail the content of every file or chosen element, and in bottom on the right stood something like a hole in the screen that represented the recycle bin. What represented the hard drive in a virtual way, in fact it was me -I mean all of me, all my history and my memories, all episodes of my conscious as my unconscious, my reflections, feelings or emotions, pains like joys, all my traumatisms. Absolutely all of what happened to me since the beginning of my life until this day was available with the Explorer. I could sail in the structure of myself, click on every element to obtain the detail of it. I was able at will to visualize it on the right of the screen, to analyze the material or emotional content of it, to strongly feel anything chosen, to observe and to understand its ramifications and its implication in the genesis of my character and in my present psychology. I didn’t only have reading access to the totality of these data, I also had the power to do what I wanted with them, what I decided to do after having observed, felt, analyzed, dissected them. I could keep them intact as modify them at will, eliminate them while dragging them to the recycle bin, order them differently while changing the structure of the hard drive, reorganizing its arborescence and content. In short I absolutely had access to all including the more essential and hidden system files, and could do absolutely all I wanted to do with anything -and it is precisely what I managed during all this interminable episode where I have thus completely reorganized and updated the whole of my neuronal brain-hard disk. It was a fantastic sensation to be at that moment the creator, the sculptor of myself, my own parent in a way.
This episode was the most important and structured part of my trip. The remainder was an uninterrupted succession of extremely varied pictures, sensations, memories, reflection, visions, but inside of which I perpetually had this feeling to be able to do what I wanted with everything that was unearthed such a way. Then toward the end of my experience, therefore probably in the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, I remember to have made many nightmares that were reminiscences of my child’s nightmares. These were quite near, by their intensity and their hardness, from the long conscious dream I made during my first trip and that constitutes the fourth phase of it, but made of an appreciably different nature.
The main trip ended on Wednesday morning to my wakening toward 9 hours, after 45 hours. However, during all the next night I made a very long and absolutely terrifying nightmare again, the worse of all I had to undergo. I only perceive since in fact, thanks to the ibogaine and to what it makes reappear, the phenomenal quantity and the destructive character of nightmares that I underwent being child, and I understand better now why and how this almost-permanent nocturnal bombardment (which also occurred daytime during my numerous illnesses and fevers) could have pushed me so close to lunacy and violence. I realize to what point they did take an essential place in the formation -or rather in the deformation – of my character, in the fragilisation of the “being in construction” that I was, and have thus greatly accentuated my vulnerability to traumatisms that I underwent in my “real” diurnal life. It would seem that the curative process of the ibogaine works a lot to that level, because during each trip except the second that was particular, it makes reappear different types of nightmares, and seems to heal of it to me. By healing, I mean the fact that every time I am the winner, after terrifying efforts and fights, of these kind of systematic destruction enterprises that are my nightmares and feel to every time ridded of them therefore, while as child I was never something else than a victim, a prey incapable to defend myself, to cope.
The last visible episode of this third trip was therefore this nightmare. After, it didn’t occur anything more but the total weariness state, both physical and mental, in which I found myself then and was long to vanish. I recovered slightly my means day after day and started to feel really energized from the following Monday. We are today on Tuesday 8 February, I’ve regained all my strengths henceforth, also my lucidity and I can take a temporary stock on my experience.
This one is greatly positive to all points of view. I feel deeply, completely changed. I don’t have any problem nor suffering, no more grief or pain, nor negative thought. In fact I have the sensation to have finished my therapy, to have accomplished the totality of work that had to be done. I have the feeling that a certain myself, the one who was sick and who suffered, is now died and buried, and that another myself was born, someone healthy and levelheaded, someone happy who likes life (1). I don’t feel any desire to drink or smoke, or to take any other drug. I rise on morning in a very good mood, feeling full of liveliness, overflowing of zing, I have in head plenty of personal and professional projects that I already began to put in work. I changed food regime, restarted training sport. I don’t have anymore nor headaches nor stomachaches nor herpes crises. I recovered my intellectual capacities, my faculty to concentrate, my memory now functions better. All ties that join me to myself and to the world became pleasant, positive. All in my way to be, to feel, to think, absolutely changed. For example I considered myself before (I am 42 years old), like an old man having the main of his life behind him, no hope, no future. I wanted my life to end, one way or another. Today I have the sensation to be a teenager making his first steps in his adult’s life, a young man under construction, sufficiently conscious and responsible to take himself in hand and to construct his life but still not completely formed, a being in growth and in becoming. I have the feeling that a long and welcoming, smiling life waits for me to take me in its arms. I see sun and mildness around me as I feel sun and mildness inside me. Climate is really nice in Bordeaux, France, today. Thank you Mother Iboga…
Regards to all,
Xavier
(1): while reading again this passage it seems to me important to specify the following point, even if it may appear incredible or incomprehensible to you reader: this was foreseen since the beginning of the concrete effects of my trip, i.e. after having swallowed the 2,5 supplementary grams. The first vision that appeared me was the one of my “true myself” come to announce me that it was therefore the end of the cycle of my recovery work, that “I”, that is the “sick ego”, was going to die and that he was going to take my place. He told me not to get worried, he said that the time was merely come to just disappear smoothly and that he would remain to my sides, would help me so that everything will comfortably happen. After that he didn’t leave me anymore, I constantly felt him with me till the end of the Explorer step, watching over me until I become him or he becomes me, I don’t know what is the adequate expression – and here he is now, and here am I.
I remember the moment of intense joy that I felt when he appeared and spoke to me, the feeling of absolute confidence and unconditional abandonment when I noted his permanent presence. I remember to immediately have understood, as soon as appeared the Explorer, that it was right the main tool that would permit me to die to myself and to become him, and I remember to have accomplished this task with an immense rejoicing.
……………………………………..
Post number three:
Commentaries about Indra’s extract
During my two first eboga trip, I had swallowed excellent quality rootbark. In the two cases, effects occurred on the same way: first symptoms appearing about one hour and a half later, then becoming more pronounced progressively until appear visions in 2D, then 3D, with sometimes personal contents. Finally, about three or four hours after ingestion, a strong but progressive sensation of takeoff occured. After this takeoff wich really propelled me through spaces, the sensation to keep the same way, whatever are the different phases of the trip, pretty much the same strength that propels you, the same speed.
With Indra’s product it was very different: the first effects appeared more quickly, about a half-hour to three quarter of an hour later. They only increased slightly during the half-hour or the three quarter of one hour that followed, then there was suddenly, without that nothing can let foresee, a sudden thrust, a violent and very short “kick in the ass” that propelled me to a slightly superior level, whose effects were however much less strong and less impressive that those gotten with the root. I didn’t have the feeling to fully have taken off, to have veritably passed in another state. It is a quite strange and paradoxical sensation, one has momently the impression of a big thrust, but quite brief and one perceives then that one is not much higher than before. Then this moderate state lasted several hours until I decided to take the 2,5 supplementary grams, because after having waited for all this time and not to have noticed a veritably efficient effect, I thought that it would not go higher. I had the feeling to stagnate to a level that was not sufficient for me.
One hour thereabouts after having absorbed the 2,5 supplementary grams, I had the sensation of a second rise, a second “kick in the ass”, as rough and sudden that the first, that propelled me higher and more quickly, more deeply in visions and in the psychological work of the ibogaine. For me, the true trip began at this instant. I had the feeling to be in a pretty much similar state in intensity or in speed than the one I had known with 35 grams of rootbark during my first trip. At this time I was very satisfied because I imagined that having reached that stage, I will remain to this level that perfectly suited me. It permitted me to do a both powerful and easy work that I seemed to master well. A lot of quickly and strong things happened, but not too quickly and not too strong.
Some hours later however (I would not know how to specify, because from the second “kick in the ass” I had lost all notion of time and didn’t have a reference mark, I just know that it was dark since a long time, therefore that was late in the evening or in the night), to my big surprise, there was a third thrust that propelled me still higher. From that moment things became more difficult to manage because sensations were distinctly stronger, all went more quickly than in the hours that had preceded. I distinctly had the impression that I had taken too much stuff, that the effect was too powerful and that it would have been better with the 7,5 original grams wich would probably have been sufficient to accomplish the same work.
I am going to use a metaphor to tempt to make you understand the sensations I had: imagine that you drive a powerful motorcycle. You start moderately after having heated the motor, give an quite energetic acceleration that brings you then to, let’s say, 120 km/h on a relatively linear road with little traffic. You have the impression of a gently drive while looking at the landscape, and some hours later you begin to find it slightly boring. Then you accelerate suddenly and in some seconds you find yourself driving 200 km/h high on a much less linear road and with quite many traffic. At that moment you are fully satisfied, because you have a sensation of speed and strength quite impressive while feeling you the master of your vehicle. Then you don’t get bored no more and you have a lot of pleasant and rich sensations.
Then some hours later, without to have wanted or decided that, the motor suddenly races and deals all its strength, bringing you in some seconds to 300 km/h while the road becomes with more numerous and tighter turns. And there all becomes a lot more impressive and more difficult, all things go extremely fast, you feel the motor in override and the whole vehicle that trembles from everywhere, you cling to the handlebar with all your strengths while trying to master the process and you only arrive with difficulty to remain on your way, to negotiate the path as it must be. Then you have the very clear feeling that all goes too quickly and too strong, you would want to slow down, to come back to previous sensations but there is no means to brake and you are forced to go until the end at this speed, until there is no more gas and the motorcycle stops. When finally it immobilizes after numerous thousand of kilometers and interminable hours of conduct without rest, you find yourself completely exhausted by this fantastic drive. Well this is pretty much what occurred to me during my experience.
I really did not expect such a third thrust after such a long time. These three steps so spaced out in the time and so brutal, whereas the first sensations arrive very quickly while being very light, all this development was indeed very different than the manner that things arose with the rootbark.
But that is about how the effects occurred. About the effects themselfes, I find them quite comparable. The few hours that followed the second rise recalled me strongly what I had known with the root. The process and the intensity were the same. The efficiency appears me to be similar. At the time of my first trip I had taken 35 grams of rootbark, and in my opinion if I had not taken this time the 2,5 supplementary grams I would probably have reached an equivalent level later and would have remained there. So, therefore, 35 grams of rootbark=7,5 grams of Indra’s product. This equivalence is quite accurately corresponding to an 1×5 extract of good quality rootbark.
And then, for an adult male wich weight is 80 kilograms, like me, six to seven grams of extract should be sufficient to get a powerful effect. I wouldn’t advise to anyone to take ten grams as I did because I think it’s definitely too much and does probably no more practical effects than absorbing 7 grams. It is the quantity that I intend to swallow for my next trip in three months. I will be able then to really compare with the equivalent of rootbark.
About uneasiness, I asked myself serious questions after my girlfriend’s experience because she had been very sick and I wondered if the product was in cause. In fact it was not at all, since I have ingested the product in gel caps without any anti-nauseating. Having lain down immediately after, without moving at all, I felt absolutely no uneasiness nor desire to vomit. Therefore on this point of view the product seems to me blameless and well tolerated by the organism. It is sufficient to absorb it in gel caps to absolutely avoid all direct contact with the mucous, then to lie down without waiting for the first effects. The necessity of an anti-nauseating probably depends on the stomach sensitivity of each, like with rootbark or Hcl.
In summary therefore, I would say that Indra’s product appears to me as an efficient, powerful product, that I gladly would recommend.
Regards to all, Xavier