Terrifying. Horrifying. Extreme torture. Tough love. Bitter medicine. 24 hours of hell realms within hell realms.
Hilarious.
These are some words that could be used to describe the juggernaut that was my New Years Iboga Flood Dose experience.
I was a bit iffy going into it, as exactly two years previously, my attempt at a 14 gram dose made into a vinegar TA extract had put me in hospital with severe and uncontrollable full body cramps. There was no discernible psychoactive effect, just a horrible feeling like i was a wet towel being squeegied for all the moisture it contained, whilst my organs were being tied into Escher designed pretzels. After three hours of these cramps, i decided i wasn’t really enjoying myself anymore and at that point my sitter, a friend of mine who had done a number of flood doses, suggested we go to the ER.
I was hoping for an entheogenic rebirth to welcome in 2017, but instead i watched the New Years fireworks display through the top floor window of my room with a drip in my arm.
‘Happy New Tears!’ I said to my Teddy Bear, Stalin.
I was all alone in the ward and it was beautiful in a way, but not quite what i had expected.
After that experience i decided i would forget about this Iboga business for a while.
Two years later i found out that there would be a very particular Iboga Facilitator from a country that i cannot name but you know well, gracing the shores of an unidentified landmass that you may be standing on this very minute. This lady went by the made-up name of Beatrice.
It seemed fortuitous to see that these dates were the exact same dates two years to the day of my first and last disastrous foray into Iboga world, so i leapt at the oppurtunity, going on faith that i was being called and that it was finally my time.
Indeed it was my time, my time to die.
As preparation, I was requested to microdose a couple of months in advance and the effects seemed to be unpredictable. Sometimes i was very wired, other times i was very calm and present, other times i had some kind of anxiety attack. I noticed my addictive habits were either completely curtailed or in fact magnified.
What a curious medicine this one is. I thought to myself one morning after microdosing, as i hyperventilated on a bus, thinking that the world was going to end while binging uncontrollably on stone fruit.
After Christmas i travelled down to a town who’s name may or may not rhyme with the words, ‘Balleen Muskatel Fortrix.’
I met Beatrice standing in the air-conditioned living room of a 1970’s house in the middle of parched grass paddock, surrounded by a pack of very skinny horses. The whole scene looked like it was from ‘Little House on the Prairie.’
Beatrice gestured towards the horses.
‘I don’t think they’ve been feeding them… I shall have to report the owners to the RSPCA if this continues.’ She said in an erudite British accent. Beatrice was an elderly dame of a slight build and unshakeable composure. In my mind’s third eye, i saw an image of her standing in front of a large shadowy hulking wrestler’s figure in an undersized white’s doctor smock with a stethoscope hanging loosely around his thick neck. The contrast of the pair was reminiscent of a comic double act, which seemed appropriate to Dr Iboga’s sense of humour, which i could describe as both brutally, bitterly honest and surrealistically absurd. In fact i can easily say that he is one of the greatest comedians in existence, one of those comedians that have jokes that start off really funny and then end up horrifying you to the point of near death.
I quizzed her on her specs. To be honest i was a bit distrusting of her initially, but as the Iboga showed me, i am distrusting of pretty much everything and everyone, possessing an overly sophisticated threat detection system, which borders on paranoid delusional at time.
That’s kind of why i was here.
‘How often do you take the medicine?’ I asked her.
‘I no longer take any medicine. I’ve had enough experiences. I’ve done them all plenty of times. I’m perfectly content now. There’s no need. People can really lose their minds if they go on taking them too much.’
Interesting idea there.
‘Besides, i separated from the mirror of existence a while ago. I’m not attached to anything. I’ve been living in paradise for several years now.’ She informed me matter-a-factly.
We body checked for my dose. 31.5 grams for me. A solid, deep dose apparently.
Beatrice liked to call herself an ‘Invigilator’ more than anything. She was to be there, present, silent and still. Only stepping in if she needed to be. There would be no music either, save for an hour of Bwiti Mouth Harp and chanting at the peak of the intense period. Otherwise total silence for close to 24 hours.
‘You will take a capful every hour when i ring the bell. Wash it down with mineral water. Be silent. Be still. Lie in the surrender pose. Do not cross your ankles. Do not lie on your stomach as this is a position of avoidance. And you have to finish your dose, even if you don’t want to by the last remaining capfuls.’
My three compatriots and i nodded pensively.
‘And now…’ She said theatrically.
‘…You are going to die.’
There was a faint feeling of unease in the room.
Beatrice laughed throatily.
We lay on our beds and began to dose.
At this point the chronology breaks down so this article will resemble a bunch of free-floating paragraphs like falling leaves.
‘I can’t remember around how many capfuls i had had, but i began to have the sensation that I was being put under anaesthetic and having all of my masks removed and disassembled.’ — Nick Sun
… I remember comparing the onset to something reminiscent of ketamine and acid but with a kind of Peyote type descent into the unconscious.
‘Iboga heals the root of disconnection in your being.’ Beatrice’s words echoed in my head.
…. I got a massive erection — well massive for me — and began to see a whole bunch of porn in my brain. It involved another participant in the circle whom i was very attracted to and look if you are reading this, i can’t apologise about it because i couldn’t help it, and i think you’re a smoking hot babe but don’t worry i respect that you do have a boyfriend and that’s that.
My high dose Peyote experience had also gone through a ‘porno stage’ and i had since theorised that the porno visions were awakening my sacral chakra, my power centre, so that the energy could be used for healing work.
… I began to see some scattered visuals… Strange disconnected visions… Absurdist in bent… Somewhere between Monty Python animation and Miyazaki films but of infinitely much higher quality… Penny farthing bicycles falling from the sky in slow motion, as if underwater… A giant blue-black whale lazily swimming around a bright light in a descending spiral… Was it in the ocean, outer space or both?… Hard to tell… Anansi the spider trying on different pairs of shoes and throwing them all away in disgust…
Bizarre plotlines sprang to mind — the only one i can remember was a romantic comedy about a person’s much loved dog dying, but then the dog is reborn as a human and they fall in love and end up marrying and having kids.
Good relationships after all, do require a good foundation of friendship to build on.
Definitely reminds me of Peyote, all this stream of unconsciousness imagery stuff. I thought to myself.
Oh yeah me and Peyote, we play chess together. I heard a soundless voice say to me. Instantly i saw Iboga and Peyote on the end of a pier that stretched very far out into the middle of deep space. I didn’t get a clear look at their appearances, but Iboga’s hulking figure dwarfed the stool that he was sitting on and Peyote was definitely wearing a cape.
Stale mate! Peyote cried triumphantly, cackling madly, moving a rotten marshmallow into a square next to a half-melted horse figurine.
Stale mate. Spoke Iboga calmly, pointing to a wad of hair that looked like it had been found at the bottom of a shower drain and the half eaten candy cane next to it.
Then we both win don’t we? We always win when the aim is to lose!
They high fived each other.
End scene.
… I watched as a swollen, misshapen yam-like-root submersible (somewhat reminiscent of the Yellow Submarine of the Beatles) began to putt-putt-putt into my field of vision. The Iboga Sub was covered in all manners of strange gizmos and attachments. Scrubbers, weird little windmill things, whirligigs, metal claws, dentistry type looking instruments, a whole range of unidentifiable and bizarre tools that looked both menacing and comical at the same time.
A little periscope turned towards me. In the centre was a big cartoon eye staring back at me.
Dr Iboga, I presume.
‘Going down!’ I heard a comical voice announce. The Iboga submersible sunk down through the layers of my consciousness, cutting back to footage of a descending elevator light going down what i realised was a pictorial representation of my spine.
Iboga is a superb cinematographer. I thought to myself.
I heard a ding as it passed through each floor.
‘Two floors below ground floor — check!’ The voice said.
‘Release the payload!’
I watched as several rectangular contraptions were released and sunk slowly to the floor of what appeared to be a great ocean full of trash and shit.
As they hit the bottom, raising a milky cloud of silt, the tops flipped open and all of this thick, flourescent green liquid began to spill out of it. At this point i literally felt my brain flood with the bitter Iboga alkaloids. I believe i could even taste some of them on the back of my throat.
This was it, i was going under.
Beatrice came to check on me.
‘Are you okay?’ She asked me.
‘Thank you so very much for checking upon me. But I assure you that I shall be fine.’ I replied in her clipped British accent, putting my hand on her arm reassuringly. I paused for a moment… Why was I speaking in Beatrice’s accent?
Perhaps i was not going to be fine.
No it wasn’t going to all be fine.
It was going to be what it was and is.
… Contradictory adjectives sprang to my mind as my intellect tried to compute the magnitude of the flood dose as it began to pull me under like a tidal wave. ‘Fast/slow’, ‘Brutal/hilarious’, ‘Short/long’, etc…
And then the mind began to break down into little pieces, my ego falling apart like a puzzle coming apart.
I heard Iboga’s voice speak to me directly.
You’re a coward. He said.
You’re a hypocrite. He said.
You were over-mothered.
You are a spoilt, entitled child at heart.
You think you are so special but you’re not.
You have Peter Pan syndrome.
You need to grow up and stop running away.
You’re a narcissist. He said finally.
Each revelation hit me like a left hook to the jaw, but this last one came as a bit of a shock, as i’d always regarded myself as the most amazing and incredible human being in the world.
Most people in the West are narcissist’s these days. Get over yourself. He said matter-a-factly.
I was then informed that the regular narcissism that afflicted the general population came from excessive energy in one’s mind and that narcissism was really just the natural end point for anyone who attempted to move through the world controlled by their intellect, raised in a mind-based culture that promoted individualism as their one of their main values. The only cure for a non-pathological narcissist was to re-route the energy back into your heart centre.
As Iboga showed me examples of various times i had acted in such lowly ways, i felt hot waves of shame over what as utter piece of shit i was, roll over me like raw sewerage.
You are defined by your actions. You can always act differently next time.
… I was taken to some kind of warehouse full of film reels. Invisible hands began to pull out reams and reams of these film reels and then the camera would zoom in on one and i would see some dumb memory that i had forgotten of some abstract experience like that time i was drunk and played table tennis with a chocolate croissant with a guy with a fuzzy face in Scotland.
Don’t need this anymore! Iboga said with satisfaction, as the reels of film flew spooling onto the floor.
Or it would zoom in and it would be some rubbish thought i had a decade ago when i was smoking too much pot like, ‘Man I wish I was a bird in the sky.’
Or jokes which had no punchlines that i hadn’t finished writing back when i was a depressed comedian, unfinished jokes like ‘What is the meaning of all this?’ and ‘What is this pain that is killing my spirit?’ The camera then panned back on the rest of the warehouse to reveal the sheer endlessness of all these spools of junk thoughts that had been accumulated over my 36 years on this earth.
Jesus Christ there was a lot of shit to go through.
It’s going to be a long night, my friend.
… I felt my base chakra flick on like a light switch. Memories, vignettes from my childhood began to form on my mindscreen, seeing myself as a nervous young child, easily frightened… Visions of my parent’s and how they raised me and how that made me who i was today… Visions of my older brother constantly putting me down and keeping me in place and how that affected my ability to assert myself in this world… Visions of my family relations, the lack of communication and how this had shaped my own maladaptive communication behaviours. Being told i was fat and a failure by my mother all the time, feeling like i wasn’t enough blah blah blah wah wah wah, you get the gist… But Iboga would show me how the consequences of these early impressions in turn influenced my present behaviour, how each coping mechanism then developed into a more highly sophisticated yet dysfunctional way of engaging with the world and how these then became parts of myself that i had mistaken as my personality. How the driving motivation for each of my behaviours was a lack of self worth and a mistaken need to perpetually prove myself in order to be worth being loved. Then how some of these strategies were ultimately maladaptive and where they would lead me if i kept doing them. I saw it all, stretching behind me into the past and then stretching forward into the future.
Yep, hats off to Dr Iboga, he was the ultimate psychoanalyst.
… I felt my base chakra casually flick on like a lightswitch. Truth be known, it was the first time i had felt my base chakra in my whole life. Suddenly i realised my life was a mess. I had always suspected this, but for the first time in my life i felt the need to have a long term plan. The life i had been living was clearly not sustainable. For the past two years i had been running clandestine Ayahuasca groups across an unnamed continent in various Air b and b’s. I had been living month to month, session to session, crisscrossing the continent in completely illogical directions, doubling back, tripling back in crazy circular routes up and down the width and breadth of the country: Stinktown to Coldrock, Coldrock to Plastic Bay, Plastic Bay back to Stinktown, Stinktown to Coldrock to Stinktown to Junglesville, Junglesville back to Coldrock. What the fuck was i doing with my life? I didn’t have a plan, i just had several delusions and the heightened capacity for denial. This was not a sustainable long term existence for me and it could not continue much longer.
I thought i had been healing people, which no doubt i had been, but i had also been running away from all of my own problems, focusing on other people’s healing processes in order to avoid having to deal with my own.
Suddenly it was revealed to me that my Ayahuasca use had really fallen off the wagon. This was not the responsible and respectable use of sacred entheogens for healing. Nay for me it had degenerated into a type of codependency where i had been drinking so much medicine that it had been blinding me to the fact that i wasn’t healing anymore, i was just spiritually bypassing under the guise of healing, getting lost in the fireworks of a brain full of seratonin and visions of otherworldly beauty that ultimately were escapist in nature and no longer related to reality anymore.
Yes it had started out as healing but by the end it was just more running away.
The truth of this knocked the wind out of my guts and i just lay there shaking.
How the fuck could this of happened?
You weren’t grounded. You weren’t careful. You weren’t disciplined. You lost your way. Said Iboga.
All that medicine you were taking was just feeding that energetic parasite of addiction on your solar plexus that you keep trying to remove. It was taking over you and you didn’t even realise.
Then it showed me the awful truth. Sure at the beginning it was all about being a part of the Grand Awakening and collective healing, but the last three Ayahuasca groups i had run had been motivated more for money. Greed. A greed so insidious i didn’t even detect it when it was there. I felt horrible, disgusted with myself, like i had betrayed my friends, the plants, Gaia, myself. I was a hypocrite all along and i was no better than all the people i used to rail against.
You’re too hard on yourself. It doesn’t help.
‘Fear gripped my balls like a priest on a cocktail of meth and viagra.’
- Nick sun
…It’s a bit blurry but i then experienced a very intense energetic parasite removal operation on my solar plexus, relating to the aforementioned parasite of addiction that controlled my greed issues. If anything they weren’t greed issues, they were actually a fear of lack issues, which were ancestral, considering that my predecessors had gone through famine.
I have a compulsive eating addiction that i felt i didn’t have much control over. It paralysed my will and kept me asleep. If you look around at the world at the moment, a lot of people have this kind of parasite and it’s kind of fucking up the world. I received a message that the parasite i had was an emanation of the Wetiko entity: (http://realitysandwich.com/75652/greatest_epidemic/ ), and i saw all these weird spore-like parasites emanating from one vast central compound Wetiko bacterium mass somewhere out in the astral that had invaded humanity. Each parasite was a part of the greater whole but a replica of the whole as well, like a fractal.
I felt Iboga begin to go to work on this particularly stubborn being which felt like a barnacle, vacuum suctioned on to my solar plexus and surrounded by layers of thick jelly.
This is the last time we can remove this thing. You have cleared it three times, first with Ayahuasca, then with Kambo and now lastly with me… If you let this thing back into yourself, you are finished. This is your last chance to get it right.’ He informed bluntly.
‘How do i let the thing back into me?’
If your discipline falters and your vibration drops… Also no more Ayahuasca. If you drink again you will lose your mind.
It then cut to a very, very realistic movie reel which very logically, showed me the loop that i was stuck in: Drinking medicine to raise my awareness by force, lacking the discipline to hold this state and falling foul of the many traps of the lower self, being then dragged back into a lower state of awareness that was even more painful now that i had experienced the higher states of awareness before, drinking the medicine again in order to try and regain my previous state, ad infinitum. This loop kept going in escalating extremes until i would eventually lose it one day and never come back. I was shown an image of my own sweet self in a mental hospital, a drooling zapped vegetable. Frankly it scared the shit out of me, to see myself as a mad man locked away in the nuthouse and it took a while for me to recover from that.
You see Nick, half of you really wants to get his shit together and the other half of you wants to drag yourself back down… So you are really going to have to decide which direction you want to go, because if you stay as you are, you will go in neither direction and this is what will happen:
He then showed me a very realistic movie reel of me that traced step by step, how not doing anything about my situation would eventually lead to ending up as someone stuck in between, a man resigned to failure and quiet desperation, unemployable, dying alone and in poverty in an inner city apartment. If anything this was even more traumatic than the first vision.
‘Not many people choose the life they truly want, most people are just corralled onto their life path and as they get older the options become less and less, until eventually they live the life that life chose for them because they didn’t want to get into the driver’s seat themselves.’
Nick Sun’s higher self to Nick Sun during Iboga flood dose.
… You seem to still be a bit terrified of death. Let’s work on this.
Iboga showed me dying in various gruesome ways with multiple camera angles and rapid ‘Requiem for a Dream’ type editing, followed by the putrefaction process. It was really unpleasant and i just had no choice but to take it until it didn’t bother as much anymore, like some kind of enforced systematic desensitisation CBT therapy.
After showing me several deaths, it then went through all of my closest friends and family, watching each of them die one by one and then rot back into the Earth.
‘What is the point of this?’
So you’re no longer are afraid of this. It’s your fear of it that gives it it’s power.’
‘Fuck this is shit.’
It’s the resistance that causes the discomfort.
… The fear of death was somehow connected to the Wetiko barnacle thing in my solar plexus. It seemed to feed off of fear. I could feel the Iboga pound the crap at it, slowly working away at it’s defences.
It has evolved quite sophisticated defences. You have cleared this thing several times now, and each time it comes back more resilient than before. If you let this thing back in again, we will not be able to remove it and you will die of stomach cancer.
Another video of my demise, this time a long painful drawn out affair revolving around stomach cancer. Yucky. I thrashed and squirmed. I wanted to cry out but there was nothing one could really do, the ataxia too great, feeling like Alex from Clockwork Orange, strapped to the chair with his eyes pried open.
Your problem is that you always forget. You never remember… And you think you can get away with it. Always trying to find loopholes, always cutting corners… Always trying to get away with it… You need something to remind yourself not to sway from the path.
I saw an image of a simple wrist tattoo of a written reminder float up to the surface of my conscious mind. It said, ‘NO MORE TRIPPING.’
Iboga then proceeded to clear all the Ayahuasca i had drunk over the years from my body. She is a mirror and i realised she had been reflecting my own blindness over the last year.
I saw an image of a pretty young indigenous girl in the jungle. She turned to look at me. She was pissed.
‘Ayahuasca?’ I called out to her.
She turned into a viper, hissed and struck out at me before a large bank vault like door closed over her image.
Well, i guess it was over. The first time and last time i ever met an anthropomorphic vision of the Ayahuasca spirit and it was to tell me that we were through. The message was clear.
I had been fired.
I felt her leave my body, not only all the delusions i had suffered in the past year, but some of her healings as well, which i realised were deals we had made that were now broken.
… I saw an image of the comedian I had once been prior to getting on the healing path — the wounded, self-destructive, depressed, angry, nihilist hedonist. It was the man that had been the cause of me getting onto this healing path in the first place. He looked at me with an evil grin and then without warning jumped back inside of me.
‘No! Get the fuck out of me, me!’ I screamed at him.
He is you. Get over it. That broken fucked up mess. He is you. Accept it. Stop pushing him away. You are both sides of the same coin, not just the shiny side, so stop kidding yourself.
…There was some kind of battle going on in my solar plexus. I was fighting for my life, my sanity, my future. If i didn’t beat this parasite i was doomed. I could feel a raging stormy sea in my belly with a weird pterodactyl foetus type thing drowning inside of it.
I don’t know how many gruelling, hellish hours it took, but eventually i seemed to finally be free of the barnacle attachment. My Solar plexus throbbed, like a scab had been peeled off, exposing bleeding, red raw belly flesh. It hurt, but at least i could feel it for the first time in a while.
‘No pain, no gain.’
- Iboga
I don’t know how much longer it went for. There are still many chapters of several books of the whole experience that are still missing somewhere in the deeper realms of my mind, and others that are for my eyes only, but I will leave it at that for this report.
I came to what felt like several years later.
For two days after, i wandered around the grounds of the property like a zombie, watching complex stream-of-consciousness Iboga cartoons unfold across the ceiling cracks of the house, or just staring into space, shell-shocked, unplugged, stripped, red raw, vulnerable as the wounded child concealed in the centre of my Russian Doll psyche, suddenly let out for some fresh air after being trapped for years in the very basement of my being.
We had a sharing circle and I confessed all my failings.
‘You don’t have to be strong.’ Beatrice told me. I broke down. It felt great to cry, i felt like i was releasing some really deeply held shit, like a trapped bubble of pain that had been there since i had been a child, allowed to finally rise to the surface and finally break and release.
‘ A lot of people walk around pretending not to be a mess, but sometimes it’s just easier to own it, be it, get over it and move on.’
- Josef Fritzl.
How much is enough?
This was enough.
24 hours of Dante’s inferno hell realms was not something I was interested in doing too often.
I had healed enough with the plants for now, it was time to heal using other means and bring my findings back to the community.
My wilderness years were over.
The only thing I managed to write down in my notebook during the whole experience was this one phrase: ‘This obsession with wellness is a sickness.’
After three days the world started clearing up and i was suffused with this calm contentment that i had never experienced before in my life. I was present and in the moment. I could enter each moment like a diver entering the sea and swim around in it. Each moment went on forever. All that shit the Eastern mystics used to talk about, all of a sudden made sense to me. This was why i had been dependent on psychedelics for the majority of my life. It wasn’t the substance, it was the feeling of being totally and utterly in the present that i had been addicted to.
This was what Dale Pendall spoke of in his Poison Path trilogy — ‘The Ground state.’ (https://psychedelic.support/resources/meditation-for-the-psychedelic-explorer/)
My eating addiction was totally gone. I managed to reset my food habits easily and not give into temptation where before i would of previously without a moment’s hesitation.
This has carried onto the present day, a month on from the report.
I have also not been tempted to drink Ayahuasca at all and of course hung up my shoes for that line of work for any authority spybots reading this fictional piece of fantasy writing how do you fucking live with yourself you narco snitch fucks?
Overall i feel much more effective than before, like i have had several hundred gigabytes of worthless crap taken out of my hard drive and unceremoniously dumped. The ultimate, brutal-yet-necessary defrag. I feel more disciplined than before and can access my willpower more readily. Although having said that, old habits die hard and trying to deal with the mental parasite otherwise mistaken as the Mind or Ego is an ongoing battle, always trying to lure me back into realms of unawareness.
Dr Iboga was able to give me a window to combat ingrained addictive behaviours that i felt bound to, but now it was up to me to build new more healthier pathways and resist falling into the old ones.
The work continues.
Using body testing, I was informed that i had to now endure reality relatively sober for this year to help integrate the last 2 years of heavy entheogenic use, aside from the occasional Iboga micro dose once in a while to help maintain and integrate this state. I couldn’t even take any herbal supplements. I’m not sure if i will be able to ever take entheogens other than microdoses of iboga, but what can you do? Fear of insanity is a pretty good motivator to keep away from them.
‘You don’t need anything, you know that right?’ said the lady whom I’d been having Iboga world porno fantasies with, just before she left.
It can be problematic to consistently rely on taking these medicines to get to these higher states, because it just doesn’t last. It fades with time. And you don’t realise it because you are losing the very thing that measures itself — Awareness. Only a vague faded memory of samahdi that now made the lower vibrational state of consciousness that you were slipping back to almost unbearable by comparison. I was going to have to learn to get to these places without the medicines for now. It was going to be harder, longer and involve more work, but I guess I’d do anything for that sweet, sweet fix of being in the eternal present forever.
The End???
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