Part Three: Quartered

A Landing Zone: an iboga story

The following is Part Three of a trip report from my Jon, the brother of my good friend. The story was shared with me with his permission. I asked if I could interview him, edit the story, and publish it. He agreed. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Jon does not wish to be contacted regarding the story, so please don’t ask for contact information.

Read Part One here.

A Landing Zone
Three: Quartered

Eventually the sun comes up and people head back to their rooms to process their experiences. We are explicitly warned that it’s better to go outside and be in nature, rather than stay shut up in our rooms. But I stay in my room, feeling like there’s more journeying to do.

Iboga is often referred to as a “24 hour trip” and it felt like my trip was needing to continue in private.

I get glimpses of other realities, other planes of existence. At times, more “elder spirits” show up and impart some wisdom to me, sometimes of a personal nature, but also about the mechanics of the spiritual side of reality.

And then I begin having visions of a man’s life in Africa. A big guy, strong, focused. He was the leader of some kind of group.

This wasn’t an ordinary tribe. Bandits, perhaps. A brotherhood. There was no question about his authority among his group. His strength and skillfulness and smarts gave him an edge that couldn’t be leveraged against. He liked it that way. Freedom from the confines of a proper tribe, and a tight control of his own group.

So, it was total anathema for him to one day find himself in chains, captured by invaders and being shipped over to the New World.

My relationship to this visionary experience shifted as it developed. Sometimes I felt quite distant from it, like I was looking at a storyboard. Other times it felt like watching a film. And then there were moments where I felt like I was in the world of the story. And then first-person experiences of the protagonist himself. Back and forth between these different modes.

My sense of authorship within this experience also shifted. At times it felt like a visionary dream, and I fell out of touch with the “real world”. And then it would be more like a Jungian process of active imagination, in which I could feel my intuitive mind connecting the narrative dots and filling in the gaps in the story.

But the experience felt more like a process of discovery than of fabrication. The material was there and I was just zooming in on it, translating it.

I think it would be very difficult to express the felt-sense of much of this experience. And to aptly convey what it was like, might be traumatizing for a reader. So I’ll keep it lighter, but you also may want to skim these paragraphs before deciding to engage with them more fully.

* * *

Large heavy shackles around my ankles, around my neck — unable to express and act upon the enormous flows of energy which converge upon the delta of my psyche and body.

The silhouettes of men in the distance, with long whips in their hands, staring at me, waiting for me to show even the slightest sign of willfulness or disrespect… ready to slice my skin open. Having to fawn at these people, eyes cast down, “Yes, master”, “No, master”. A tension that never breaks, day or night. Each moment is a trauma.

The body becomes like a pressure cooker. A swarm of bees in a hive with no exit. The desire for freedom was never surrendered — a desire held fast by an identity formed from a life of power.

There was no seeking of inner peace. No transcendent reconciling of fate. Only an ever-growing resentment, a deep, red-hot hatred towards the oppressors.

Shame. A sense of weakness and defeat.

He wanted their power. He wanted to be the one with the whip in his hand. He lost all respect for himself, and grew to respect power and power alone.

Eventually he came up with a plan to escape. He somehow convinced one of the women of the plantation family to sneak him out of his chains and into some private place. He killed that woman with a hammer and then he ran. He ran for a long time. And he was hunted. Every day and every night, he ran and hid for his life.

He would hear the dogs in the distance, searching for him. He stayed up in the trees. He would sit with blood on his hands, knowing that even if he was free of his chains he would never be free of the life that he took.

This is also something that it is very hard to express — the heaviness of being a murderer. Believing that no one will ever trust you again.

It’s just you and the dark cold night, for eternity.

Eventually the man was caught. They hung him from a tree, castrated him, brutalized him, and set him on fire. They created a Hell on Earth for him.

And that’s what I was sitting with all day on my bed. I could not eat. I would not talk to anyone. It was devastating.

When I could afford some analytical distance, I could see the parallels between his story and my own, the feeling of being chained down, held back, always alert, always frustrated, resentful. It was a lot to process. I cried a lot, my body would shake, I stared blankly into the distance, experiencing a kind of shell shock.

And the visionary narrative continued into his afterlife.

* * *

His desire for power, unrelinquished to the last, sunk his soul down towards Hell, toward the unmatched power that comes with complete detachment from humanity. But his will to live, as a man, upon the Earth, was still strong.

And for ages he was caught between worlds, in a liminal purgatory, just as he was on Earth.

The inner tension of his former life remained inside him — but as his connection to that life faded, it was recognized that only he was in control of this tension now. It was his choice. And if he wanted another life, he would have to release his desire for power.

And when he was finally ready to let go, he was met by an entourage of other souls who offered him the opportunity to go on a pilgrimage of metaphysical rehabilitation, a path back from the gravity of Hell.

I didn’t see all the details of that pilgrimage. But he was currently tasked with acting as a guide for a human soul. That soul was mine. He helped me remain connected to the Earth during my earliest traumas. He gave me a second chance to live, as I was also giving him.

Part Four: Imagination Addiction