I first heard of ibogaine from Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, even though he had previously written about it in Breaking Open the Head, which is still in my reading queue. He also talked about it in a 2003 Guardian article titled “Ten years of therapy in one night,” whose teaser reads: “Could a single trip on a piece of African rootbark help a junkie kick the habit? That was the claim in the 1960s, and now iboga is back in the spotlight. But is it a miracle cure? Daniel Pinchbeck decided to give it a go. And life, he says, will never be the same again.”
Now R.U. Sirius, the man who helped to break open my own head at the tender age of 18 when I started reading Reality Hackers, later to become Mondo 2000, later to morph, sort of, into Wired, has compared ibogaine to the wake-up pill offered by Morpheus to Neo:
Ibogaine is a hallucinogenic compound containing Iboga, a substance largely found in the African Tabernanthe Iboga root. It’s safe to say it’s the world’s least popular psychedelic substance. An Ibogaine trip lasts 36 hours and is understood to launch the deepest probe into personal psychological material available to humans on planet earth. A couple of hours into the experience, the Ibogaine tripper experiences an irresistible need to lie down and close her eyes. After than, (s)he will usually receive information — often experienced as though watching scenes on a giant screen — about all the accumulated traumatic events and the other types of awkward, uncomfortable, pathetic elements of personality and experience that the vulnerable human organism represses — partially or entirely — in order to “grow up” and maintain the socialized ego required by a complicated and competitive civilization.
What seems to emerge from these experiences is not a shipwrecked husk of a human being (as occasionally happened with LSD). It’s more like the tripper has undergone a very positive “extreme makeover” — but not one of a superficial sort. Indeed, many of those in the West who have had the opportunity (and need) to experience Ibogaine arrived at the experience as shipwrecked husks — they were drug addicts.
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My sense is that most people would rather “work on themselves” for 40 years than be dragged in front of stark actuality — a terrifying something that we have no control over. So … will you take the red pill? Or will you take the blue pill … “you wake up in bed and believe whatever you want to believe” … for a long, extended time?
Full story at Red Ice Creations.
A better candidate for a red pill is ayahuasca, and its primary active constituent, DMT. If the doors it opens are entries to real places (however you define “real”), that’s equivalent to discovering an underlying but mostly invisible matrix, per the film. Ibogaine seems to be more useful for personal/ancestral insight and analysis, which explains some of its efficacy in ending addictions.
I actually agree with you, Michael, despite my attempt to create a catchy post title by referring to ibogaine as the possible red pill. DMT is, for me, the most fascinating substance and subject in the psychedelic world right now, although psilocybin is making admirable strides in that direction thanks to, e.g., the recent Johns Hopkins research.
Ibogaine makes DMT look like Kool-Aid. DMT will safely take you someplace unfamiliar for a few minutes, or a few hours, depending how you take it. Yaeee, look at the pretty colors, weeeee. If you think anything like that is coming with Ibo, you are in for a dangerous shocker.
Ibogaine will make you confront some really emotional things in your history in which you have no control. It can make you see and feel the pain you caused others. If you have a demon, you are going to confront it. The feeling is like drinking a whole bottle of whiskey while huffing gasoline. Very unpleasant feeling. There is a lot of vomit, you cant move because you feel something like altitude sickness and vertigo. It is the most powerful, and the most miserable drug I have ever taken. I do not want to take it again.
I will say with absolute certainty that it is the cure to opiate addiction. Anyone who says otherwise does not understand Ibogaine, nor the word ‘cure’. I took it to get off the methadone, and it achieved that on both a physical and emotional level. Damn right it worked. For months after, for the first time in my life, I felt complete. I was absolutely sure that my life was about now and tomorrow, and the past did not decide my future. We can all repeat that a million times, and it means nothing. To actually feel it in my whole being completely changed who I am. It is amazing stuff.
Thank you sincerely for the first-person account. Sounds like your whole life was deeply changed.
The “shipwreck” factor is definitely there with LSD
Cut post. Continuing….
The shipwreck thing can come about in many ways, but the main ones I’ve noticed are: massive de-repression of traumatic memories, Insight attainments I wasn’t ready for (leading to the Dark Night, and incredibly unskillful behavior if it isn’t consciously recognized and dealt with, as anyone reading my emails and posts knows), and recklessness with set & setting. But then again, the first two don’t have to be a problem if the tripper has the right support and practices some kind of spiritual discipline. This ain’t raver/hippie shit we’re talking about…
Speaking of which, I wonder what would have happened to Burroughs if he’d gotten hold of iboga ? In the Yage Letters he mentions morphing into a black woman in the ayahuasca trance, and there’s definitely an unconscious feminine element in some of his earlier prose works, a dark, wrathful, knife in teeth kind of single motherhood, perhaps…
I wonder if anyone takes this DMT and finds out how to get out of here and back into reality. I only hear reports where people have an experience, but experience for what? Because I know people who took DMT for decades and is still living here, bothering the whole neighborhood.
I have recently taken LSD and twice I have had a reoccurring dream almost aligning its self with the matrix. A red pill Blue Pill scenario and I want to know what it means because I know it’s not just “another trip” It has happened more than once and I need to know why. It goes like this, I am above almost as a cloud and upon looking down I see Idiots, Drunks, And Just uneducated people. The last time it was more like we were all herded into a group like cows, and given drugs to combat our sense of reality. If anyone can help me decipher this dream/vision it would be great.
Watch Hitchhiker’s Guide. I’ve had a similar experience while watching it on a quarter of mushrooms. Cattle for meta dimensional beings. Psilocin is essentially edible DMT, and my first blast off was like getting out of a VR machine surrounded by entities in a carnival/fair (rides and freak shows) like setting where they took me to a white room to be opened up and filled w/ love.
is anyone aware of a way to overcome the “shipwreck” state after a strong LSD trip? i am experiencing this for years now and have (stupidly?) refused to look for conventional help or therapy, because i somwehow think this would only scratch the surface and also would not help me out on a spiritual level, or am i just ignorant?
to describe my state a little more, the analogy of having the blue pill and the red pill intus at the same time is expressing it really good. i feel drawn between the to since years and haven’t found a way i can live with. job, money, society, everything is forcing me to surpress this struggle but i feel something has to happen. am i just arrived in the philosophical issue of mankind? every conversation about this gives me hope, be it only in textform in the net. i am glad i found this page and the article with “blue pill red pill lsd” in a searchengine. thanks
embrace it brother embrace it
don’t be afraid of it
search for it and see it, it has no merit in this world. its a concept like science and religion an idea. and does not explain reality only complicates it.
get off your high horse brother
and live
and search
and see it
DO NOT FEAR IT
I have done more than most , In terms of I have actually hacked it you won’t believe me but then thats understandable. If you are a of a certain disposition or still very aware when you are tripping you will sense and know that this is played out. Yes this will freak you out but it will anyone and make you not kind of believe it or push it aside. Obviously this kind of info is fucking rare and you will all go bollocks but then thats natural. Tripping can give you insights into collective feelings/scenarios that are gathering and morph then become readable. You can then read the people and see where they or how they are going to react. You can actually see the immediate future but it isn’t really that great as if you’re off you’re head you can play with it as you might if you are tripping. I suppose it is mainly due to time and the spatial situation but I think it has to end there as it can turn bad due to getting above yourself.Yes you can see the future but its probably not meant to be played with. I do regret what I discovered and yes it did affect me as no one knows and doesn’t really divulge anything like i have 100 percent witnessed.
Hope this thread isn’t dead.
I am a 19 year old kid reading this and while reading all of your replies, it all makes sense. I have been greyed out due to depression of my first love breaking up with me and the meeting of one of my good friends that was into lsd. I took my first trip with him and around peak hours, I remember distinctly closing my eyes and it was as almost a world of energy and connections exploded in my head as if I had gained some sort of super power and everybody we were tripping with, we’re able to have a conversation about what was going on inside of my head. Whatever my mind trippin balls would think of, wether that be judgmental, personal, or totally random. But it was like whatever those people would say, would match perfectly as either a compliment or comment on every thought I had. I knew there had to be more. The rest of the trip I was so blown away with what had happened to me that I was only mustered to 3 words. But it was okay, because I didn’t even have to talk to contribute to the conversation, it was so new and something completely unbelievable for me at the time. The next 2 trips I had were nothing special.
Fast forwarding into today, me and my friend go to play tennis and we were playing beside a group of older people (besides the point) but at some point during our game, (I am normally very quiet and do not talk much, i try to be nice to everybody with my mouth. Although I will admit my brain is a bit sour) one of the older men pointed out somebody while it was almost if I was tapped into their conversation while I was playing, (this normally only happens if I am high on thc which I am very frequently) and he pointed out somebody and said something about the matrix and how I was “in the clouds”. I never really thought anything of it as I casually walked around catching tennis balls flying at me athletically with ease. Or if they would say something negative or on some way that I didn’t like, I would mess up my swing, or look like a fool trying to play tennis.
We had been playing tennis for over 45 minutes at this point, and their conversation continued and my thoughts still gave judgement to their conversation, and then at some point I guess my mind was not okay with where it was and said why don’t you invite me some sort of thought that involved either the group of older people. Literally the next serve my friend served me which I missed, one of the women had asked me if I wanted to play pickle ball with them that they split a tennis count into 2 pickle ball courts. It was almost immediately i had predicted the future. This had happened on multiple occasions to where I could predict or think of things like this.
Today i looked up the matrix, how to tell if you’re in the matrix. Sitting on my phone all day, no motivation, it all makes sense. I also feel that often I still do have the power of tripping almost to where my brain transcends into a different frequency or level input, it is very strange and I am looking for answers and or help because everything I’ve tried hasn’t helped, even a social worker just recommended me to a drug rehab program which I knew I did not need. This tread is what can describe what I have been experiencing almost up to a perfect point. Please, help me.
Reading this more and more makes me more and more conscious as if a being or some sort of energy is within me. I have these thoughts as if I was predicting the future that would tell me horrible things, like how people would die, i for the most part dismissed them and just thought of it as one of my abnormal thoughts although it would kinda of bug me. But with the discovering of this thread my curiosity skyrocketed, what brought me to this thread? I can only describe the feeling of my brain racing on LSD which was a very potent gel tab and my most recent trip as if time only moving at a set pace as if I am light speeding through time and we’re just stuck along to suffer the horrors of humanity. While we were tripping we were talking about the pyramids and how everything made way to much sense to not make sense to us. During that trip I also felt as If I was being taken over by a demon and my friends has to me get it out and I also felt as if I was going to die during that trip, almost as if I was going tk have a seizure and I had to stand up and find some way to get it out. I need answers