RhythmSpring
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2008
- Messages
- 2,255
March 25, 2019 EDIT: I had Lyme disease and Babesia at the time of dosage. I was also suppressing my immune system with drugs for rheumatoid arthritis. I was not well during the time of this experience. It's almost a miracle I survived. Babesia is dangerous and can affect the heart, which should make it contra-indicated with iboga.
If you have a chronic illness and want to trip, I suggest getting on a routine of cleansing, grounding herbs FIRST before foraying into the non-physical.
~
Yeah so I did this back in February... it's now June. Here's the report. Kudos to anyone who sits through the whole thing. If you like details, this one's for you.
EDIT: Preface: It's important to note that at the time of this experience, I had been practicing some pretty out-of-whack health habits, including, but not limited to *severe* dietary restriction and also abstinence from all sexual activity for at least 1 month. I think this contributed to the off-kilter, stressful, and largely unproductive nature of this experience. Thank you for reading.
~~~
The 3 grams of iboga TA sat in a little bowl. I eyeballed 5/6 of it, set 1/6 aside. I dumped the 5/6 (which should have been about 2.6 grams) into some water. It did not mix at ALL with the water. Like oil and water. So i mashed up an avocado into it. I inadvertently created a barf-textured and colored substance that I gulped down in about 7 gulps. Each gulp was accompanied by a prayer by me. I prayed mainly for my health and for the healing of my relationships with certain people. It took concentration to succeed in holding down each gulp.
I think I went to my computer and listened to music until I felt it kick in. I could tell it was kicking when I noticed a sensation of being viscerally connected with the earth. It felt as if the bottom of my torso had opened up wide so that the contents of my abdomen and chest were shared and being exchanged with the contents of the earth. The main result of this was a feeling of release of stuff from me into the Earth and a feeling of dirty, shitty (as in shit-like, not negative), dark, huge, exhilarating emptiness and vertigo. The feeling of gravity was now sacred.
This connection to the earth is much like standing at the top of an immensely deep, dark pit that reaches the center of the earth. A trachea-like pit, or a rope, or a long, generous tongue that has unfurled all the way down to the bottom of the Earth's core.
When I felt high (or low, rather), I lay down on my wide futon bed, which I had prepared to be extra comfortable. I had next to the bed on the floor a garbage pale (to barf in when the time came), and a glass of water.
I lay down on my fouton and closed my eyes, and got the spinning feeling in my head. I believe this spinning feeling is associated with nystagmus (eye-wiggles, like the side effect from MDMA). Anyway, I've had this wobble/spinning feeling before, non-drug induced, but was afraid of it because I didn't think it was natural--it feels like my consciousness slipping away. However, now that it was happening on iboga, I trusted the feeling more.
The wobbling turned into rapid spinning, and my consciousness began to travel straight downward into the earth, as if being lowered by a pulley system. I could hear the whirring of the spinning pulley, revving up with speed and winding down when the lowering slowed. The spinning feeling completely disoriented me and my entire body felt like it was spinning. Intermittently I would dread the descent, my mind hesitating, and thus the lowering would slow down, stop, and/or move back up. I descended by surrendering and ascended in fear, back and forth, for an hour(?) or so. It was clear that the experience wasn't going to happen until I was ready. The upwards or downwards movements corresponded exactly to my willingness to go through with the experience.
The last few times I resurfaced before going down for good, I realized that part of what was blocking my journey was my desire to evaluate Iboga. I had to remember and reaffirm quite emphatically that I was doing this to figure out my own life, not figure out Iboga. I cursed myself for attempting to catalogue the experience scientifically and objectively.
Along the descent, I had flashes of images and snippets of sounds of what lay at the bottom: a bleak, arid landscape. A small group of skinny, extremely simple-lived African people. Beautiful women laughing. Drumming. An iboga plant. They were laughing and encouraging me in a very non-forceful way ("You don't have to do this if you don't want to, but look how good it is down here!") They were communicating into a funnel, which connected to a pipe, which ultimately was connected to my descending consciousness.
One way I could tell I was under the influence was whenever I closed my eyes, I would see my own eyes under my eyelids staring back at me, as if in a rearview mirror. Later, when I got up, my sense of hearing was greatly sensitized, and I could hear the minutest details of everything. There were some visual tracers which were quite delightful to witness as well.
Having trouble surrendering to the experience, I called out to my sitter. Unfortunately, he had a load of laundry going and the washer/dryer lay humming and rumbling between us, and he didn't hear me until perhaps the 10th time I called him. When he did come into the room, he was very supportive and told me to remember my intentions. He's a 62 year old songwriter with a lot of life experience, as well as experience with dealing with other people on psychedelics. He hadn't encountered iboga until I introduced it to him, but he did ample research on it prior to my trip. I felt comfortable and secure on his watch. I will take this moment to acknowledge the absolute necessity of a trip sitter. I could not have done this without him.
He came in and sat with me as I descended, and from there, my ego dissipated and I remember little. My short-term memory was gone for the next 24 hours. The next 12 hours are a smattering of memories, in no particular order, and some may have been fabricated. According to my sitter, I was at first in a lot of confused distress, tossing and turning. I have vague recollections of existential and identity panic and apocalyptic visions. I do remember a string of unrelated visions, one after another, forgetting them as if they were dreams. One experience I do remember clearly was of being a newborn/fetus aborted into a toiletbowl and abandoned somwhere in Central Africa. I remember the wetness, looking up at my mother, both of us completely helpless at the situation. We were not angry though, just very very sad. I also had visions of absolute cruelty--especially in urban black neighborhoods. White against black. It seemed that Iboga was showing me the darkest suffering of mankind. Some more "memories"...
At the time of the journey, I was constantly in touch via internet with my girlfriend at the time, who was away in Budapest. At the time, we were having some intense ups and downs in our relationship. It had been on a sort of Crossroads for a while now. I imagined--like fabricated memories--that she kept emailing me these messages on the come up of the experience. (I may or may not have been actually on the computer at this point.) She told me that she was in touch with some "witchy-women" healer/psychic, (which was true) and asking them for guidance on our relationship (not true). She asked me to give her little bits of information about myself, or just asked out-of-context questions, my answers to be fodder for the prediction/guidance (that's a dichotomy that should be thought about...) Questions like "2 or 3." "How much do you weigh?" or other short, simple questions like that.
On the come up (although "go down" seems more fit of a description), she also told me random things that I wasn't exactly sure of the reasons why she was telling me them. As the experience got stronger and stronger our conversation took on a more and more Urgent tone, and her messages were seeming more and more important yet I was still questioning them, not understanding them, or saying "I know" and then moving on. I would say a bunch of stuff to her and she would say "PEN" And I'd be like "Yeah I know." She'd say "Drink Water" and I would say "I do... that's all I ever drink, you know that." Later it dawned on me that it is easy to be dangerously dehydrated in an iboga experience. In fact, for days after ingesting the iboga, I had absolutely no sense of thirst. By the fifth day it had gradually returned along with real hunger. Later I also took "PEN" to mean "Don't forget to write things down as you experience them so as not to forget them later, for they may be valuable."
I also fabricated a memory that she told me she did some research on iboga herself and she was told that some people think iboga induces physiological changes in the body, having to do with the heart fusing with the ribcage, or something having to do with the pineal gland. She was concerned. She also said that she heard that iboga makes men more masculine, sometimes to dangerous levels- Like they can be short tempered following an experience. And that iboga makes a man very good in bed. And also couples have succubus/incubus experiences while one of them is under the influence.
As I made some mental breakthroughs, I felt like relating my breakthrough to her briefly in an email. I felt very courageous. I wrote the words "I choose to Believe" ...words that still resonate with me today.
Today, I think the iboga spirit, in order to get its messages across to me, took on the voice of my girlfriend, whether in my head or remembered as words seen on the computer screen. They were simple messages, like those that would come from one's heart:
"Don't forget to write"
"Use your left hand" (I "heard" this when I was drumming later in the experience)
"Don't forget to drink water"
"Drink some water"
"PEN"
"Remember"
A lot of the experience had to do with the internet. It's hard to explain, but Iboga's push for individual development is somehow analogous to the internet's evolution toward something productive and wholesome. Or at least toward our own learning how to use the internet as it is meant to be used: as a tool, for information, communication. Resist abusing.
I have scattered memories of parts of the experience that involved the internet- so here is a smattering of them.
I have a memory of going online, and finding a recent thread about iboga on Bluelight.ru, a drug forum. The OP (original poster) said simply:
Anybody try iboga? How was it for you?
And the following responses, of which there were hundreds, were equally simplistic, many of them confusing.
"Alright."
"Got the job done."
"Simply put."
"Did the trick."
"A million bucks."
"I couldn't stop peeing."
"It turns you into a zombie."
"I cried, then I laughed. Then I cried. Then I laughed."
One post was about a paragraph, which basically said that a friend of a friend tried it and HATED it.
Another post was about a friend who took it and was suddenly extremely prolific both in conversation and in writing. He indicated that iboga could be a surefire cure for writer's block. In fact, taking iboga automatically made you a brilliant writer. However, this friend would come to sudden stops in his creativity and become extremely frustrated. It's as if his creativity was either fully on, or fully off.
Another poster wrote a long post about how he predicts that this very thread will end up on the news, because it is so unusual (that everyone was responding simplistically) and because it's about a new and revolutionary drug/medicine, iboga. He also predicted that the thread would be deleted in the future because of this unwanted media attention, or because the government/big pharma would have none of it.
I became so convinced of this memory/hallucination that the following morning I told my sitter, as he sat at his computer, to expect something in the news about a forum thread.
The following day, I also had this internet-related experience. I hallucinated that my girlfriend was telling me about an internet documentary that she watched for a class, or because one of her friends had to watch it for a class, and it was worth sharing. She remarked to me that at some point during the film, the filmmaker appeared to be giving birth. I asked her about the film and she told me it was sort of a boring interview of a strange person, a "tortured intellectual-type." This person, she said, sort of reminded her of me, and so did his name. She said it is creepy to watch. She gave me the link.
I also remember coming to the interview by another means--Someone on facebook had posted 2 or 3 very short snippets of the documentary, somehow. I would click on the video, and it would be about 1 second long, like a moment of the interviewee gazing out the window wistfully. Apparently this window-gazing was a key part of an hidden truth about the film. It occurred to me that perhaps the looking away out the window was a telltale sign of lying.
For a while I avoided watching it, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. In real life, I watched it. It was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQLiy7AHx8
It did end up creeping me out. I don't think I finished it.
Another memory from the first night:
The Iboga spirit was towering over me and judging me, trying to figure out what to change about me and how. Finally it decided to erase my identity. It took a pencil, applied the eraser end to my consciousness, or an area located in front of my forehead, and with frightening speed (it took like 10 seconds), it erased a paragraph-like form that represented my identity. At that moment, my brain felt profoundly changed.
Another memory:
I remember sitting in a dark shack in the same arid landscape I was lowered to at the beginning of the experience. A stump was in front of me. My mind was extremely plain. Normally I am a highly complex thinker, but not here. In fact, my vocabulary consisted of perhaps a dozen words. Slowly it grew, from the ground up. It felt like a rebirth of my grasp on the English language. I learned that it is best used concisely, plainly, and simply put. There is humble power and crystalline eloquence in that style of communication.
Another memory:
I remember getting up, from the futon, waves of nausea hitting me. The waves of nausea corresponded exactly with waves of emotions and memories, ever approaching release and understanding that would take the form of me vomiting. I rushed across the house to the bathroom and threw up like I never have before. I have never vomited while vocalizing at the same time before, but that time I did. I guess now I know the full meaning of "retching." I would describe this part of the experience as unpleasantly satisfying. I was afraid to vomit, and it did not come easily. I wish I had taken advantage of my nausea and purged more, for i felt like i kept some stuff inside that needed to come out. Nevertheless, it was greatly relieving and this purge marked a powerful shift from Darkness to Light in my overall experience.
~~~
The following is a summation of lessons, insights and bits of wisdom that the iboga spirit imparted to me during the experience. It's difficult to organize in normal, logically flowing prose, so I'm going to leave it in its pure form. I am leaving out countless other insights that I may have forgotten the words to.
Stick. Rock. Dirt. Stump. Hand. Red, darkness. Trying til you get it right. Hitting stuff.
Shit.
Simply put.
Simplicity, humility, gratitude
Knowledge of the Wrongness that is inherent in Humanness. Fault. Flaw. Mistake. Judgement is thinking you're right. No. You are human. You are wrong, that is what it means to be human. You have fault and you are forever doomed to the fate of faultiness. Original sin, even. You will always have the capacity to do wrong, to make a mistake, and there is no way you can make sure that you won't.
At the same time, this capacity to make Mistakes is part of the tremendous creative power in humans, especially associated with the divine Masculine.
Vision/dream of divine concepts as objects floating about in a dark room. Masculine, Feminine, Perfection, Imperfection, Evil, Human, Positive, Negative.
Vision/dream of the universe consisting of a boy and a girl crouching in the center of a dark, empty room, lost and confused, noticing little bits of light. Reminiscent of Plato's Cave.
The media is in a process of literally making fun of itself without realizing it. Like a snake eating itself. The media is the rational mind of humanity- humanity's collective effort to label events with images, concepts, etc. The media is abusing this power by trying to manipulate the people. It is essentially turning people into a form of Zombies. People that are Full of Stuff. I go onto the computer repetitively, check the internet, check my email, check facebook, check the news, etc. We are dead-waiting on the next image to come up. Zombies are people that are filled with generic, regular, repetitive stuff, they have forgotten originality.
The experience was very difficult. Hard. Challenging, feared to be insurmountable. Before: "I wonder how I'm going to get through this experience." After: "I Believed." (and "I Remembered") The way to achieve is to Believe.
It's not just You are ecstatic on/after iboga- the Universe is ecstatic with you. You don't sway, the universe sways with you. It smiles with you.
Taking iboga is like taking the most satisfying shit you've ever taken.
Punctuation.
Tricks! The universe is made up of tricks!
"Tricks" has a dual meaning. One, as a malicious prank, two as a curious illusion.
Fool- Innocence we pity, hate
Darling - Innocence we adore
To tell ones fortune also has a dual meaning: It is either to predict or to guide. Prediction is bad, Guiding is good.
Blades. My mind is a blade (not a sword, but a blade. Well, yes, a sword is a type of blade but what we really mean here is "blade.") Cutting through illusion. For example, slicing words in half (see the above words I defined.)
The ultimate insult- Fool. And it is thrown onto me.
I have no friends.
So I was deleted.
Infinity is boring.
The extinguishment of consciousness is not to be feared, because you wouldn't experience it.
To reside. I am residing. You are residing. We are residing. Can't figure out what to do? Reside.
Is your ultimate purpose to conquer the world? It often is.
I can feel what living in an ideal world feels like.
This modern world has too many things.
"I am always right." -this is a lie we tell ourselves over and over.
There is no shortcut, ever.
Perfection in imperfection
Iboga is RUDE.
A bucket flap opening and closing. Like something had broken through it. Binary. Now it is either on or off.
"Nothing."
The understanding that we are all writers, if only just writing our own personal stories.
See all that is Not me. Part of my Identity.
"Truth never felt so good."
There really are infinite permutations of words, thoughts, images etc.
Iboga turns you into an animal.
The winner of an argument is the one who has greater stamina in talking.
3x3
I am listening to my Heart. Actually, my Gut. My gut. The feeling of needing to stretch. I could understand completely the feeling of getting swept up in something much larger than yourself. It is part of human nature, for us to crave being a part of something huge. This can be productive or destructive.
deep down earthy feeling. Breathing and abdominal muscles are relaxed, drooping down, down to the earth. this is a "Descent." Stan Grof and Carl Jung would eat this up like crazy. Works on the lower, male chakras. Feel a fiery, red energy come up through my legs and warm my heart. Iboga is POWER. It is POWERFUL. It is powerful KNOWLEDGE. IMPORTANT.
I thought about my girlfriend and became tearfully amazed that she has stuck with me all this time--after what an ignorant fool I've been towards her.
"I swallows me whole." -- The way into the Underworld of your subconscious is through your own mouth (and down through each facet of your digestive system).
NOW I'm interested in education. Because I carry the message that true teaching means to teach someone else how to get the facts from within themselves.
~~~
After the vomiting purge, I spent the night on the futon in the living room, propped up on some pillows. I was in front of the fire place. I don't think there was a fire in it, but there might as well have been, because I felt a warm smoldering in front of me, or in my chest, which appeared to be a ribcage made of stone. My heart was pounding and rapid, and I went inside that place. It was like it was an engine made of iron and stone, with a blue-red fire burning inside. It was beautiful--I felt like I was witnessing my own courage. The engine was vibrating and turning, resonating deeply like a tiger's growl, saturated with anger, courage and power. My heart burns just writing about it. I growled and felt my teeth against eachother, my jaw gently but firmly set, with my lower jaw protruding a bit and my canine teeth touching.
I may have slept.
I "awoke" to a slowly brightening living room, which was divinely joyous and peaceful. Birds awoke, and the Sun seemed to be carrying a message of generous optimism. Infected with optimism, I told my trip sitter that something great would be in the news that day. Incidentally, that was the day Mubarak, president of Egypt abdicated after peaceful demonstrations. I felt like Paradise had arrived. There was an unshakeable feeling that the universe had also changed as well as me, along with the state of affairs in the world.
That day, I sat on a comfy chair, 100% completely relaxed in perfect posture, basking in stillness and do-nothingness. Iboga encourages you to Sit Up Straight! I felt my aura was big, fluffy, purple (and various shades/layers of it), stately and royal. It was supremely comfortable. I reminisced and conjectured that I may have been a king in a past life, and that I was a royal soul and deserved special respect (okay, slight ego trip there). I lay in the futon and sat on the comfy chair seemingly all day, peacefully meditating, being in what honestly could best be described as La-La land. The sun was literally pouring through, shining generously, filling the room with beautiful, liquid, warm light. I drifted. As I daydreamed I imagined ornate pictures, wall ornaments, bird houses, birds, insects in the room. I think I know now what real "hallucinating" is like. It is to powerfully imagine. I could see how the images I was projecting were a product of my imagination. The Sun kept its pouring effect for months after the trip and it gave me a lot of joy to witness it.
As a sidenote, I have severe rheumatoid arthritis, affecting all my large joints. This day it was virtually all gone. The fact that I fasted for a day or so beforehand did not hurt. The inflammation returned about 4 days after ingestion. The other physiological changes I experienced: My tongue hurt and I couldn't taste, my lips were REALLY chapped, my wrists were extremely sweaty (I get that way on Salvia too. Both Iboga and Salvia apparently are kappa-opioid receptor agonists), and my feet, for the first time all winter, were NOT sweating inside my wool socks.
I remember playing with my dog, running around the living room chasing and being chased by him. I had an unshakeable feeling that I was in the Savannah of Africa, stalking through the swaying tall tan grasses, peering in between the tops of the blades with great precision to make out forms of animals. I was animalistically alert. I felt like a gazelle--I felt a sense of "bounding," as a spritely animal does. I enjoyed pacing around swiftly.
I am a hand drummer. Today, as I would on any other substance, I tried drumming. This time it was REALLY different--I had lost my sense of rhythm! This was surprising because psychedelics usually enhance my drumming. I am usually spot-on with my sense of timing, and I always feel compelled to make original rhythms--but not this time. It was startling, but I felt like expressing this feeling of power I had, so I just hit the drum, over and over again, slow, then faster, then slower. Drumming brought into the physical space I was in a solemn Presence that was terrifying, powerful and sacred. It was as if the drumming was communicating a message, and the message consisted entirely of one giant exclamation mark... as if to say "Bam! Wake up! Here I am! Look here! Be Here Now!" The drumming was so passionate that I felt like if the government knew how powerful it was, it would probably be outlawed.
I remember rushing to the computer excited to listen to songs I knew, to see how they would sound different. Immediately I realized that they did indeed sound different. Normally, when I listen to music, I get in the groove and feel the pulse of the beat. However this time, I could not settle in the pulse. It seemed to be constantly speeding up and slowing down, but always faster than normal. This sensation was one in the same with the "bounding" feeling I mentioned before. Two songs that stuck out to me were "Easily" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and "Black" by Pearl Jam." Though the rhythm was screwed up, I felt the emotion of the songs like never before.
With music sounding crazy and not being able to drum, I became deeply worried that I was no longer a musician--a central part of my identity. Perhaps my musicianship was erased by Iboga along with the rest of my identity?
~~~
The day came to an end, and I lay on my bed again, wondering if I would sleep. The walls in the dark appeared to be covered with thousands of glow-in-the-dark stickers, like the ones I had in my childhood bedroom. The overall feeling was futuristic. I felt like there were three keyboards in front of me which connected me via futuristic internet to futuristic and far away planets and civilizations. This dreamy bliss was abruptly interrupted by a moment of stupidity: I turned on my side and felt that I had done some terrible damage to my own energy field, for I was in such a high, sensitive state. I convinced myself that I felt so wrong, and it ruined the next hours for me. I had no real ego to protect me from this fear of damage.
Later I attempted to fall asleep. As I lay in bed, I felt like rotting to death. It was a profoundly humbling feeling that I'm not sure I want to experience again. Images of zombies, dumpster heaps, stale graveyards filled my mind. I wasn't panicking, but I definitely wasn't comfortable.
Another attempt to fall asleep led to an absolutely horrifying sensation of being in extreme danger, like being at gunpoint, or even being shot. In my half-asleep state I was having visions of shooting games in Old Europe. The games were supposed to be harmless, at a shooting range, but sometimes there would be characters who would play with the others that were inconceivably cruel for the sake of being cruel. I was a player in this game, and I was subject to and aware of this extreme, unforgivable, cunning cruelty which completely devalued human life.
I "awoke" to these visions in absolute panic, feeling psychically raped. The feeling was like being shot in the eyes, or like having one's brain recklessly bombed repeatedly with the promise that it would continue for all of eternity. I got up and slammed my desk hard, screaming in a panic. My sitter came to the rescue, calming down and asking me what exactly was going on. This happened one or two more times.
I decided to pick up a book from the bookshelf entitled "Calming Your Anxious Mind." I was shaken. I held onto one piece of wisdom from that book, that I still hold with me today, and it is forever precious. Do Nothing. When you are scared and do not want to be, simply do nothing about it. Relax, and realize that what is causing your fear is your own mind. It is simple, profound, and so easy it's hard (but it's actually easy).
By this time it was Friday (I ingested Wednesday night). Time was severely dilated; it felt like weeks after I ingested. Each moment was completely full, present, and thus time appeared to move slowly. This effect made me keep thinking that it's been far too long since I ate anything, and that I simply had to get some food in my system or else I would be being unhealthy. This was a mistake. My body was simply not ready for food. I think I just ate some apples and some almond butter.
I took a walk or two that day too. It was sunny and there was snow and ice on the ground. I wasn't able to enjoy the walking as much I could have because I was still pretty shaken up from the visions I had the previous night. But I did notice that the sun was acting like a liquid, pouring through the branches, expansive and beautiful, soothing and optimistic.
I lay down in the snow outside the house facing the sun in mid-afternoon, and there were two perfect rainbow circles around the sun. I felt very optimistic and comforted, a good antidote to the previous night.
~~~
What I gained from this experience:
Aside from any knowledge or experience, the way I felt in the wake of the Iboga experience was extremely powerful. I felt like I had been handed a gigantic chunk of Time by God. I felt free to do what I like, whether it be destructive or productive. I felt grounded, solid, and my mind was clear and stark. I felt really good. At the same time, I felt profoundly humble and small. Reality seemed huger than ever, and I now felt in touch with a lot of darkness in reality. I felt wise; my naivete had been stripped away.
I also felt like I had completed a satisfactory coming-of-age ritual. I had passed a threshold of consciousness, and could now be considered a responsible adult. I felt this as a weight and a loss. I felt respectfully dutiful everything in an egalitarian way. It is no surprise that Iboga is used as a coming-of-age rite in Western and Central Africa. Although I was here in the United States, I felt a strong connection to Africa. I remain interested in visiting Africa, which I never even considered before the experience. Coincidentally, my Iboga trip took place while my mother was spending a week in Morocco.
There is more. And of course there are things I learned and experience that are meant for my mind only. The experience was infinitely deep (although Iboga says infinity gets boring after a while), extremely multifaceted, and a complete review of my soul. I took the remaining 1/6th of the 3 grams of Iboga TA one week later, and memories of the initial experience came back to me along with a feelings of solemnity and sacredness. Iboga says if you want to remember your Iboga experience, take more Iboga.
It is now almost 6 months after the experience, and I bought some Iboga rootbark to microdose myself with, in hopes of possibly treating arthritis, fatigue, anxiety, or any other problem I might have. I took it for about 5 days and then stopped because I had a surgery coming up. The effect was a bit mild, but I did have that sensation of being viscerally connected to the center of the Earth via pit or long tongue.
All in all, Iboga is Power, Medicine, and to be GREATLY respected.
Oh, and the surgery was successful. I needed almost no pain medication. I suspect the microdosing increased my sensitivity to the painkillers they gave me.
If you have a chronic illness and want to trip, I suggest getting on a routine of cleansing, grounding herbs FIRST before foraying into the non-physical.
~
Yeah so I did this back in February... it's now June. Here's the report. Kudos to anyone who sits through the whole thing. If you like details, this one's for you.
EDIT: Preface: It's important to note that at the time of this experience, I had been practicing some pretty out-of-whack health habits, including, but not limited to *severe* dietary restriction and also abstinence from all sexual activity for at least 1 month. I think this contributed to the off-kilter, stressful, and largely unproductive nature of this experience. Thank you for reading.
~~~
The 3 grams of iboga TA sat in a little bowl. I eyeballed 5/6 of it, set 1/6 aside. I dumped the 5/6 (which should have been about 2.6 grams) into some water. It did not mix at ALL with the water. Like oil and water. So i mashed up an avocado into it. I inadvertently created a barf-textured and colored substance that I gulped down in about 7 gulps. Each gulp was accompanied by a prayer by me. I prayed mainly for my health and for the healing of my relationships with certain people. It took concentration to succeed in holding down each gulp.
I think I went to my computer and listened to music until I felt it kick in. I could tell it was kicking when I noticed a sensation of being viscerally connected with the earth. It felt as if the bottom of my torso had opened up wide so that the contents of my abdomen and chest were shared and being exchanged with the contents of the earth. The main result of this was a feeling of release of stuff from me into the Earth and a feeling of dirty, shitty (as in shit-like, not negative), dark, huge, exhilarating emptiness and vertigo. The feeling of gravity was now sacred.
This connection to the earth is much like standing at the top of an immensely deep, dark pit that reaches the center of the earth. A trachea-like pit, or a rope, or a long, generous tongue that has unfurled all the way down to the bottom of the Earth's core.
When I felt high (or low, rather), I lay down on my wide futon bed, which I had prepared to be extra comfortable. I had next to the bed on the floor a garbage pale (to barf in when the time came), and a glass of water.
I lay down on my fouton and closed my eyes, and got the spinning feeling in my head. I believe this spinning feeling is associated with nystagmus (eye-wiggles, like the side effect from MDMA). Anyway, I've had this wobble/spinning feeling before, non-drug induced, but was afraid of it because I didn't think it was natural--it feels like my consciousness slipping away. However, now that it was happening on iboga, I trusted the feeling more.
The wobbling turned into rapid spinning, and my consciousness began to travel straight downward into the earth, as if being lowered by a pulley system. I could hear the whirring of the spinning pulley, revving up with speed and winding down when the lowering slowed. The spinning feeling completely disoriented me and my entire body felt like it was spinning. Intermittently I would dread the descent, my mind hesitating, and thus the lowering would slow down, stop, and/or move back up. I descended by surrendering and ascended in fear, back and forth, for an hour(?) or so. It was clear that the experience wasn't going to happen until I was ready. The upwards or downwards movements corresponded exactly to my willingness to go through with the experience.
The last few times I resurfaced before going down for good, I realized that part of what was blocking my journey was my desire to evaluate Iboga. I had to remember and reaffirm quite emphatically that I was doing this to figure out my own life, not figure out Iboga. I cursed myself for attempting to catalogue the experience scientifically and objectively.
Along the descent, I had flashes of images and snippets of sounds of what lay at the bottom: a bleak, arid landscape. A small group of skinny, extremely simple-lived African people. Beautiful women laughing. Drumming. An iboga plant. They were laughing and encouraging me in a very non-forceful way ("You don't have to do this if you don't want to, but look how good it is down here!") They were communicating into a funnel, which connected to a pipe, which ultimately was connected to my descending consciousness.
One way I could tell I was under the influence was whenever I closed my eyes, I would see my own eyes under my eyelids staring back at me, as if in a rearview mirror. Later, when I got up, my sense of hearing was greatly sensitized, and I could hear the minutest details of everything. There were some visual tracers which were quite delightful to witness as well.
Having trouble surrendering to the experience, I called out to my sitter. Unfortunately, he had a load of laundry going and the washer/dryer lay humming and rumbling between us, and he didn't hear me until perhaps the 10th time I called him. When he did come into the room, he was very supportive and told me to remember my intentions. He's a 62 year old songwriter with a lot of life experience, as well as experience with dealing with other people on psychedelics. He hadn't encountered iboga until I introduced it to him, but he did ample research on it prior to my trip. I felt comfortable and secure on his watch. I will take this moment to acknowledge the absolute necessity of a trip sitter. I could not have done this without him.
He came in and sat with me as I descended, and from there, my ego dissipated and I remember little. My short-term memory was gone for the next 24 hours. The next 12 hours are a smattering of memories, in no particular order, and some may have been fabricated. According to my sitter, I was at first in a lot of confused distress, tossing and turning. I have vague recollections of existential and identity panic and apocalyptic visions. I do remember a string of unrelated visions, one after another, forgetting them as if they were dreams. One experience I do remember clearly was of being a newborn/fetus aborted into a toiletbowl and abandoned somwhere in Central Africa. I remember the wetness, looking up at my mother, both of us completely helpless at the situation. We were not angry though, just very very sad. I also had visions of absolute cruelty--especially in urban black neighborhoods. White against black. It seemed that Iboga was showing me the darkest suffering of mankind. Some more "memories"...
At the time of the journey, I was constantly in touch via internet with my girlfriend at the time, who was away in Budapest. At the time, we were having some intense ups and downs in our relationship. It had been on a sort of Crossroads for a while now. I imagined--like fabricated memories--that she kept emailing me these messages on the come up of the experience. (I may or may not have been actually on the computer at this point.) She told me that she was in touch with some "witchy-women" healer/psychic, (which was true) and asking them for guidance on our relationship (not true). She asked me to give her little bits of information about myself, or just asked out-of-context questions, my answers to be fodder for the prediction/guidance (that's a dichotomy that should be thought about...) Questions like "2 or 3." "How much do you weigh?" or other short, simple questions like that.
On the come up (although "go down" seems more fit of a description), she also told me random things that I wasn't exactly sure of the reasons why she was telling me them. As the experience got stronger and stronger our conversation took on a more and more Urgent tone, and her messages were seeming more and more important yet I was still questioning them, not understanding them, or saying "I know" and then moving on. I would say a bunch of stuff to her and she would say "PEN" And I'd be like "Yeah I know." She'd say "Drink Water" and I would say "I do... that's all I ever drink, you know that." Later it dawned on me that it is easy to be dangerously dehydrated in an iboga experience. In fact, for days after ingesting the iboga, I had absolutely no sense of thirst. By the fifth day it had gradually returned along with real hunger. Later I also took "PEN" to mean "Don't forget to write things down as you experience them so as not to forget them later, for they may be valuable."
I also fabricated a memory that she told me she did some research on iboga herself and she was told that some people think iboga induces physiological changes in the body, having to do with the heart fusing with the ribcage, or something having to do with the pineal gland. She was concerned. She also said that she heard that iboga makes men more masculine, sometimes to dangerous levels- Like they can be short tempered following an experience. And that iboga makes a man very good in bed. And also couples have succubus/incubus experiences while one of them is under the influence.
As I made some mental breakthroughs, I felt like relating my breakthrough to her briefly in an email. I felt very courageous. I wrote the words "I choose to Believe" ...words that still resonate with me today.
Today, I think the iboga spirit, in order to get its messages across to me, took on the voice of my girlfriend, whether in my head or remembered as words seen on the computer screen. They were simple messages, like those that would come from one's heart:
"Don't forget to write"
"Use your left hand" (I "heard" this when I was drumming later in the experience)
"Don't forget to drink water"
"Drink some water"
"PEN"
"Remember"
A lot of the experience had to do with the internet. It's hard to explain, but Iboga's push for individual development is somehow analogous to the internet's evolution toward something productive and wholesome. Or at least toward our own learning how to use the internet as it is meant to be used: as a tool, for information, communication. Resist abusing.
I have scattered memories of parts of the experience that involved the internet- so here is a smattering of them.
I have a memory of going online, and finding a recent thread about iboga on Bluelight.ru, a drug forum. The OP (original poster) said simply:
Anybody try iboga? How was it for you?
And the following responses, of which there were hundreds, were equally simplistic, many of them confusing.
"Alright."
"Got the job done."
"Simply put."
"Did the trick."
"A million bucks."
"I couldn't stop peeing."
"It turns you into a zombie."
"I cried, then I laughed. Then I cried. Then I laughed."
One post was about a paragraph, which basically said that a friend of a friend tried it and HATED it.
Another post was about a friend who took it and was suddenly extremely prolific both in conversation and in writing. He indicated that iboga could be a surefire cure for writer's block. In fact, taking iboga automatically made you a brilliant writer. However, this friend would come to sudden stops in his creativity and become extremely frustrated. It's as if his creativity was either fully on, or fully off.
Another poster wrote a long post about how he predicts that this very thread will end up on the news, because it is so unusual (that everyone was responding simplistically) and because it's about a new and revolutionary drug/medicine, iboga. He also predicted that the thread would be deleted in the future because of this unwanted media attention, or because the government/big pharma would have none of it.
I became so convinced of this memory/hallucination that the following morning I told my sitter, as he sat at his computer, to expect something in the news about a forum thread.
The following day, I also had this internet-related experience. I hallucinated that my girlfriend was telling me about an internet documentary that she watched for a class, or because one of her friends had to watch it for a class, and it was worth sharing. She remarked to me that at some point during the film, the filmmaker appeared to be giving birth. I asked her about the film and she told me it was sort of a boring interview of a strange person, a "tortured intellectual-type." This person, she said, sort of reminded her of me, and so did his name. She said it is creepy to watch. She gave me the link.
I also remember coming to the interview by another means--Someone on facebook had posted 2 or 3 very short snippets of the documentary, somehow. I would click on the video, and it would be about 1 second long, like a moment of the interviewee gazing out the window wistfully. Apparently this window-gazing was a key part of an hidden truth about the film. It occurred to me that perhaps the looking away out the window was a telltale sign of lying.
For a while I avoided watching it, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. In real life, I watched it. It was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQLiy7AHx8
It did end up creeping me out. I don't think I finished it.
Another memory from the first night:
The Iboga spirit was towering over me and judging me, trying to figure out what to change about me and how. Finally it decided to erase my identity. It took a pencil, applied the eraser end to my consciousness, or an area located in front of my forehead, and with frightening speed (it took like 10 seconds), it erased a paragraph-like form that represented my identity. At that moment, my brain felt profoundly changed.
Another memory:
I remember sitting in a dark shack in the same arid landscape I was lowered to at the beginning of the experience. A stump was in front of me. My mind was extremely plain. Normally I am a highly complex thinker, but not here. In fact, my vocabulary consisted of perhaps a dozen words. Slowly it grew, from the ground up. It felt like a rebirth of my grasp on the English language. I learned that it is best used concisely, plainly, and simply put. There is humble power and crystalline eloquence in that style of communication.
Another memory:
I remember getting up, from the futon, waves of nausea hitting me. The waves of nausea corresponded exactly with waves of emotions and memories, ever approaching release and understanding that would take the form of me vomiting. I rushed across the house to the bathroom and threw up like I never have before. I have never vomited while vocalizing at the same time before, but that time I did. I guess now I know the full meaning of "retching." I would describe this part of the experience as unpleasantly satisfying. I was afraid to vomit, and it did not come easily. I wish I had taken advantage of my nausea and purged more, for i felt like i kept some stuff inside that needed to come out. Nevertheless, it was greatly relieving and this purge marked a powerful shift from Darkness to Light in my overall experience.
~~~
The following is a summation of lessons, insights and bits of wisdom that the iboga spirit imparted to me during the experience. It's difficult to organize in normal, logically flowing prose, so I'm going to leave it in its pure form. I am leaving out countless other insights that I may have forgotten the words to.
Stick. Rock. Dirt. Stump. Hand. Red, darkness. Trying til you get it right. Hitting stuff.
Shit.
Simply put.
Simplicity, humility, gratitude
Knowledge of the Wrongness that is inherent in Humanness. Fault. Flaw. Mistake. Judgement is thinking you're right. No. You are human. You are wrong, that is what it means to be human. You have fault and you are forever doomed to the fate of faultiness. Original sin, even. You will always have the capacity to do wrong, to make a mistake, and there is no way you can make sure that you won't.
At the same time, this capacity to make Mistakes is part of the tremendous creative power in humans, especially associated with the divine Masculine.
Vision/dream of divine concepts as objects floating about in a dark room. Masculine, Feminine, Perfection, Imperfection, Evil, Human, Positive, Negative.
Vision/dream of the universe consisting of a boy and a girl crouching in the center of a dark, empty room, lost and confused, noticing little bits of light. Reminiscent of Plato's Cave.
The media is in a process of literally making fun of itself without realizing it. Like a snake eating itself. The media is the rational mind of humanity- humanity's collective effort to label events with images, concepts, etc. The media is abusing this power by trying to manipulate the people. It is essentially turning people into a form of Zombies. People that are Full of Stuff. I go onto the computer repetitively, check the internet, check my email, check facebook, check the news, etc. We are dead-waiting on the next image to come up. Zombies are people that are filled with generic, regular, repetitive stuff, they have forgotten originality.
The experience was very difficult. Hard. Challenging, feared to be insurmountable. Before: "I wonder how I'm going to get through this experience." After: "I Believed." (and "I Remembered") The way to achieve is to Believe.
It's not just You are ecstatic on/after iboga- the Universe is ecstatic with you. You don't sway, the universe sways with you. It smiles with you.
Taking iboga is like taking the most satisfying shit you've ever taken.
Punctuation.
Tricks! The universe is made up of tricks!
"Tricks" has a dual meaning. One, as a malicious prank, two as a curious illusion.
Fool- Innocence we pity, hate
Darling - Innocence we adore
To tell ones fortune also has a dual meaning: It is either to predict or to guide. Prediction is bad, Guiding is good.
Blades. My mind is a blade (not a sword, but a blade. Well, yes, a sword is a type of blade but what we really mean here is "blade.") Cutting through illusion. For example, slicing words in half (see the above words I defined.)
The ultimate insult- Fool. And it is thrown onto me.
I have no friends.
So I was deleted.
Infinity is boring.
The extinguishment of consciousness is not to be feared, because you wouldn't experience it.
To reside. I am residing. You are residing. We are residing. Can't figure out what to do? Reside.
Is your ultimate purpose to conquer the world? It often is.
I can feel what living in an ideal world feels like.
This modern world has too many things.
"I am always right." -this is a lie we tell ourselves over and over.
There is no shortcut, ever.
Perfection in imperfection
Iboga is RUDE.
A bucket flap opening and closing. Like something had broken through it. Binary. Now it is either on or off.
"Nothing."
The understanding that we are all writers, if only just writing our own personal stories.
See all that is Not me. Part of my Identity.
"Truth never felt so good."
There really are infinite permutations of words, thoughts, images etc.
Iboga turns you into an animal.
The winner of an argument is the one who has greater stamina in talking.
3x3
I am listening to my Heart. Actually, my Gut. My gut. The feeling of needing to stretch. I could understand completely the feeling of getting swept up in something much larger than yourself. It is part of human nature, for us to crave being a part of something huge. This can be productive or destructive.
deep down earthy feeling. Breathing and abdominal muscles are relaxed, drooping down, down to the earth. this is a "Descent." Stan Grof and Carl Jung would eat this up like crazy. Works on the lower, male chakras. Feel a fiery, red energy come up through my legs and warm my heart. Iboga is POWER. It is POWERFUL. It is powerful KNOWLEDGE. IMPORTANT.
I thought about my girlfriend and became tearfully amazed that she has stuck with me all this time--after what an ignorant fool I've been towards her.
"I swallows me whole." -- The way into the Underworld of your subconscious is through your own mouth (and down through each facet of your digestive system).
NOW I'm interested in education. Because I carry the message that true teaching means to teach someone else how to get the facts from within themselves.
~~~
After the vomiting purge, I spent the night on the futon in the living room, propped up on some pillows. I was in front of the fire place. I don't think there was a fire in it, but there might as well have been, because I felt a warm smoldering in front of me, or in my chest, which appeared to be a ribcage made of stone. My heart was pounding and rapid, and I went inside that place. It was like it was an engine made of iron and stone, with a blue-red fire burning inside. It was beautiful--I felt like I was witnessing my own courage. The engine was vibrating and turning, resonating deeply like a tiger's growl, saturated with anger, courage and power. My heart burns just writing about it. I growled and felt my teeth against eachother, my jaw gently but firmly set, with my lower jaw protruding a bit and my canine teeth touching.
I may have slept.
I "awoke" to a slowly brightening living room, which was divinely joyous and peaceful. Birds awoke, and the Sun seemed to be carrying a message of generous optimism. Infected with optimism, I told my trip sitter that something great would be in the news that day. Incidentally, that was the day Mubarak, president of Egypt abdicated after peaceful demonstrations. I felt like Paradise had arrived. There was an unshakeable feeling that the universe had also changed as well as me, along with the state of affairs in the world.
That day, I sat on a comfy chair, 100% completely relaxed in perfect posture, basking in stillness and do-nothingness. Iboga encourages you to Sit Up Straight! I felt my aura was big, fluffy, purple (and various shades/layers of it), stately and royal. It was supremely comfortable. I reminisced and conjectured that I may have been a king in a past life, and that I was a royal soul and deserved special respect (okay, slight ego trip there). I lay in the futon and sat on the comfy chair seemingly all day, peacefully meditating, being in what honestly could best be described as La-La land. The sun was literally pouring through, shining generously, filling the room with beautiful, liquid, warm light. I drifted. As I daydreamed I imagined ornate pictures, wall ornaments, bird houses, birds, insects in the room. I think I know now what real "hallucinating" is like. It is to powerfully imagine. I could see how the images I was projecting were a product of my imagination. The Sun kept its pouring effect for months after the trip and it gave me a lot of joy to witness it.
As a sidenote, I have severe rheumatoid arthritis, affecting all my large joints. This day it was virtually all gone. The fact that I fasted for a day or so beforehand did not hurt. The inflammation returned about 4 days after ingestion. The other physiological changes I experienced: My tongue hurt and I couldn't taste, my lips were REALLY chapped, my wrists were extremely sweaty (I get that way on Salvia too. Both Iboga and Salvia apparently are kappa-opioid receptor agonists), and my feet, for the first time all winter, were NOT sweating inside my wool socks.
I remember playing with my dog, running around the living room chasing and being chased by him. I had an unshakeable feeling that I was in the Savannah of Africa, stalking through the swaying tall tan grasses, peering in between the tops of the blades with great precision to make out forms of animals. I was animalistically alert. I felt like a gazelle--I felt a sense of "bounding," as a spritely animal does. I enjoyed pacing around swiftly.
I am a hand drummer. Today, as I would on any other substance, I tried drumming. This time it was REALLY different--I had lost my sense of rhythm! This was surprising because psychedelics usually enhance my drumming. I am usually spot-on with my sense of timing, and I always feel compelled to make original rhythms--but not this time. It was startling, but I felt like expressing this feeling of power I had, so I just hit the drum, over and over again, slow, then faster, then slower. Drumming brought into the physical space I was in a solemn Presence that was terrifying, powerful and sacred. It was as if the drumming was communicating a message, and the message consisted entirely of one giant exclamation mark... as if to say "Bam! Wake up! Here I am! Look here! Be Here Now!" The drumming was so passionate that I felt like if the government knew how powerful it was, it would probably be outlawed.
I remember rushing to the computer excited to listen to songs I knew, to see how they would sound different. Immediately I realized that they did indeed sound different. Normally, when I listen to music, I get in the groove and feel the pulse of the beat. However this time, I could not settle in the pulse. It seemed to be constantly speeding up and slowing down, but always faster than normal. This sensation was one in the same with the "bounding" feeling I mentioned before. Two songs that stuck out to me were "Easily" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and "Black" by Pearl Jam." Though the rhythm was screwed up, I felt the emotion of the songs like never before.
With music sounding crazy and not being able to drum, I became deeply worried that I was no longer a musician--a central part of my identity. Perhaps my musicianship was erased by Iboga along with the rest of my identity?
~~~
The day came to an end, and I lay on my bed again, wondering if I would sleep. The walls in the dark appeared to be covered with thousands of glow-in-the-dark stickers, like the ones I had in my childhood bedroom. The overall feeling was futuristic. I felt like there were three keyboards in front of me which connected me via futuristic internet to futuristic and far away planets and civilizations. This dreamy bliss was abruptly interrupted by a moment of stupidity: I turned on my side and felt that I had done some terrible damage to my own energy field, for I was in such a high, sensitive state. I convinced myself that I felt so wrong, and it ruined the next hours for me. I had no real ego to protect me from this fear of damage.
Later I attempted to fall asleep. As I lay in bed, I felt like rotting to death. It was a profoundly humbling feeling that I'm not sure I want to experience again. Images of zombies, dumpster heaps, stale graveyards filled my mind. I wasn't panicking, but I definitely wasn't comfortable.
Another attempt to fall asleep led to an absolutely horrifying sensation of being in extreme danger, like being at gunpoint, or even being shot. In my half-asleep state I was having visions of shooting games in Old Europe. The games were supposed to be harmless, at a shooting range, but sometimes there would be characters who would play with the others that were inconceivably cruel for the sake of being cruel. I was a player in this game, and I was subject to and aware of this extreme, unforgivable, cunning cruelty which completely devalued human life.
I "awoke" to these visions in absolute panic, feeling psychically raped. The feeling was like being shot in the eyes, or like having one's brain recklessly bombed repeatedly with the promise that it would continue for all of eternity. I got up and slammed my desk hard, screaming in a panic. My sitter came to the rescue, calming down and asking me what exactly was going on. This happened one or two more times.
I decided to pick up a book from the bookshelf entitled "Calming Your Anxious Mind." I was shaken. I held onto one piece of wisdom from that book, that I still hold with me today, and it is forever precious. Do Nothing. When you are scared and do not want to be, simply do nothing about it. Relax, and realize that what is causing your fear is your own mind. It is simple, profound, and so easy it's hard (but it's actually easy).
By this time it was Friday (I ingested Wednesday night). Time was severely dilated; it felt like weeks after I ingested. Each moment was completely full, present, and thus time appeared to move slowly. This effect made me keep thinking that it's been far too long since I ate anything, and that I simply had to get some food in my system or else I would be being unhealthy. This was a mistake. My body was simply not ready for food. I think I just ate some apples and some almond butter.
I took a walk or two that day too. It was sunny and there was snow and ice on the ground. I wasn't able to enjoy the walking as much I could have because I was still pretty shaken up from the visions I had the previous night. But I did notice that the sun was acting like a liquid, pouring through the branches, expansive and beautiful, soothing and optimistic.
I lay down in the snow outside the house facing the sun in mid-afternoon, and there were two perfect rainbow circles around the sun. I felt very optimistic and comforted, a good antidote to the previous night.
~~~
What I gained from this experience:
Aside from any knowledge or experience, the way I felt in the wake of the Iboga experience was extremely powerful. I felt like I had been handed a gigantic chunk of Time by God. I felt free to do what I like, whether it be destructive or productive. I felt grounded, solid, and my mind was clear and stark. I felt really good. At the same time, I felt profoundly humble and small. Reality seemed huger than ever, and I now felt in touch with a lot of darkness in reality. I felt wise; my naivete had been stripped away.
I also felt like I had completed a satisfactory coming-of-age ritual. I had passed a threshold of consciousness, and could now be considered a responsible adult. I felt this as a weight and a loss. I felt respectfully dutiful everything in an egalitarian way. It is no surprise that Iboga is used as a coming-of-age rite in Western and Central Africa. Although I was here in the United States, I felt a strong connection to Africa. I remain interested in visiting Africa, which I never even considered before the experience. Coincidentally, my Iboga trip took place while my mother was spending a week in Morocco.
There is more. And of course there are things I learned and experience that are meant for my mind only. The experience was infinitely deep (although Iboga says infinity gets boring after a while), extremely multifaceted, and a complete review of my soul. I took the remaining 1/6th of the 3 grams of Iboga TA one week later, and memories of the initial experience came back to me along with a feelings of solemnity and sacredness. Iboga says if you want to remember your Iboga experience, take more Iboga.
It is now almost 6 months after the experience, and I bought some Iboga rootbark to microdose myself with, in hopes of possibly treating arthritis, fatigue, anxiety, or any other problem I might have. I took it for about 5 days and then stopped because I had a surgery coming up. The effect was a bit mild, but I did have that sensation of being viscerally connected to the center of the Earth via pit or long tongue.
All in all, Iboga is Power, Medicine, and to be GREATLY respected.
Oh, and the surgery was successful. I needed almost no pain medication. I suspect the microdosing increased my sensitivity to the painkillers they gave me.
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