Letter #2: Iboga
Dear Subscribers,
Some of you asked to hear more about my Iboga ceremony. For those who do not know, Iboga is a rain forest shrub that grows in West Africa, particularly Gabon, the DRC, the Republic of Congo, and Cameroon. It is an important part of the Bwiti religion centered in Gabon.
I looked it up on Wikipedia just now. It is amazing how consistent Wikipedia is in belittling and scoffing at anything alternative to conventional medicine and rigid scientific materialism.
In African traditional medicine and rituals, the yellowish root or bark is used to produce hallucinations and near-death outcomes, with some fatalities occurring. In high doses, ibogaine is considered to be toxic, and has caused serious comorbidities when used with opioids or prescription drugs.
This introductory paragraph is flagrantly inaccurate. The purpose of Iboga use is not to produce “hallucinations.” The visionary states it sometimes produces are incidental to the main purpose, which is healing, connection to the ancestors, to one’s soul, and to God (although I suppose, in the minds of Wikipedia’s editors, such experiences are indeed hallucinations). Only much later in the article does it mention, dismissively, that “anecdotal reports” indicate that iboga produces a “reduced desire to sustain opiate abuse.”
OK, so much for the Wikipedia version of reality. Now for my version. Iboga is the most profound medicine I have ever encountered. Before I describe how it took me apart and reassembled me, I want to say something about the ceremonial context. The people who served us the Iboga were Bwiti initiates who had been to Gabon many times to receive progressive levels of initiation. I personally would not take the drug outside that kind of container. Not only that, but Wikipedia is right that people do sometimes die from Iboga, since its “active constituent” (ibogaine) prolongs the QT interval between heartbeats, sometimes leading to cardiac arrest. Therefore, it is best for the Bwiti initiates serving the medicine to be assisted by an initiate into the cult of Western medicine—a doctor or an EMT. The medical initiate will request a preliminary ritual called an “EKG,” and interpret its signs to divine the risk of heart trouble during the ceremony. She will also have another shamanic implement, a defibrillator, on hand in case of serious heart arrhythmia.
When the ceremony is held by initiates of both lineages, Bwiti and Medical, it is quite safe—though not necessarily pleasant.
It is not from some politically virtuous ideal of “respect for other cultures” that I think it is so important to receive the medicine in the context of Bwiti. It is because the Bwiti have developed a kind of advanced technology that maximizes the power of the medicine.
When “respect for indigenous cultures” draws from Wikipedia reality, it is not real respect. Real respect is not to condescendingly “celebrate” other cultures with the unspoken assumption that our own knowledge and technology is superior to theirs. Real respect understands that other cultures have progressed along an entirely different axis of development. They may not have invented the integrated circuit, but when you immerse in their realities you may find they have cultivated capacities and modes of intelligence that we have barely dreamed of.
We need those capacities today. Modern civilization has reached an impasse. Its means and methods are helpless before its crises. In fact, its means and methods have produced its crises. Do we really want to subsume all the other ways of seeing, knowing, and being under our own? Do we really want to homogenize the world under the banner of development, to educate it into our ways of thinking, to subject it to the same degradation of nature, culture, and the body that is consuming Western civilization? We do not. That doesn’t mean to repudiate our own path of development and the treasures we have found on it. However, the time has come to bring together all the treasures from all the paths humans have trodden. That is how we will pass the threshold before us.
One of the technologies Bwiti culture has developed is a kind of polyrhythmic music that operates in exquisite synergy with the Iboga medicine. It is not easy listening. One cannot bring its rhythms to order. It eludes the mind’s grasp; it doesn’t make sense. On the medicine, each drumbeat or knocker or cowbell sent shivers through the constructs of Charles. They were like the sounds of the sledgehammers and pick-axes and jack-hammers of a demolition crew that had been put to work on my brain. For me, the experience wasn’t psychological; it was neurological. The medicine and music took apart the scaffolding holding my psychology, thereby making it available for change. I didn’t have any “hallucinations” as Wikipedia calls them, no visions, not even any new insights. What happened was more profound than that.
OK, personal material follows that is available to paid subscribers only, as part of the series “Letters from Charles Eisenstein.” I explained last time why I am keeping some of my writing to a smaller, more intimate audience, and how to receive a gift upgrade if you have limited financial means.