Chapter 2 My initiation into the Bwiti came at a time when I was losing interest in myself. I felt like an actor who had lost the motivation for his part. Or I was like the character of "Daniel Pinchbeck", trapped in a half-finished novel that an incompetent author was in the sluggish, surly process of abandoning.

I fell into a spiritual crisis.

I fell, and I could not get up.

Wandering the streets of the East Village, I spent so much time contemplating the meaninglessness of existence that I sometimes felt like a ghost. Perhaps I am already dead, I thought to myself. The world seemed to be wrapped in a cocoon I could not tear open, and I was suffocating in it. I did not want what other people wanted, but I didn't know how to find what I needed. I wanted truth -- my own truth -- whatever bleak fragment of whatever hellish totality it might turn out to be.

There are reasons why I, particularly, got sucked into this spiritual void. When I look back over my life, I can see the open jaws of the abyss awaiting me. Through my mother, Joyce Johnson, a writer of novels and memoirs, I was linked to the often maligned and sometimes revered writers of the Beat Generation, frantic in their pursuit of mystical experience across the globe (when Jack Kerouac was on a TV talk show in the late 1950's, he was asked what he was looking for. Drunk and defiant, he replied, honestly, "I am waiting for God to show me His Face." At the time, my poor mother, all of twenty-two years old, was anxiously waiting for him backstage.)

My mother sent mixed signals about her Beat past. One the one hand, the high school yearbook quote she dedicated to me was from On The Road: "mad to live, made to love, mad to be saved..." Yet the life she seemed to want me to lead was that of a sheltered middle-class intellectual. She had seen too many friends destroyed by bohemian excesses, ruined by alcohol or speed.

A second reason lies in my preposterous last name, which sometimes feels like wearing a clown's red nose. The word can be found in any good dictionary: "pinchbeck" is a type of false gold. This shiny alloy of zinc and copper, still used in costume jewelry, was invented by Christopher Pinchbeck, an eighteenth-century English alchemist who was also a maker of intricate mechanical clocks for British aristocrats. Later the definition of "pinchbeck" expanded to mean anything false or spurious -- for instance, according to the example in one old dictionary, "The 19th Century was a pinchbeck age of literature." James Joyce included the world in Ulysses. Recently, William Safire championed its revival.

This spurious moniker has kept me remote, to some extent, from the hard facts of existence. Behind the pinchbeck facade, life always seems slightly illusory, an alchemical and improbable process. Perhaps I also inherited my ancestor's urge to seek out wonder, as well as my father's yearning for transcendence, expressed in his enormous and brooding abstract paintings. In the quest described in this book, I suspect I am working through some business left over from my heritage, as if mystical yearnings run, like rogue genes, in family trees.

My reference points for a spiritual crisis were books and authors -- Nausea, Notes from Underground, The Stranger ; Kafka, Beckett, Rilke -- the eloquent despair of twentieth-century literature. As I wandered the streets in desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimate childish question, why? -- Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course, I knew that "why" was a question you were supposed to stop asking around the age of ten, but I couldn't free myself from it.

I mocked myself by recalling a sequence from Hannah and Her Sisters where the character portrayed by Woody Allen first learns he has a brain tumor, then finds out he doesn't have one after all, yet still realizes -- no matter how improbable it seemed before, when he was, like most of us, in cheerful denial -- he will die someday. Suddenly obsessed with finding a meaning to life, he joins several religions including Hare Krishna and Catholicism -- for the skit's high point, he goes to the supermarket to buy a loaf of white Wonder Bread as a sign of his new Christian faith. In the end, he resolves his crisis at a Marx Brothers double feature, realizing that laughter is, if not an answer, at least the only solace he can imagine.

I was in a worse place than Woody Allen. I needed some solace beyond laughter.

My options looked pretty bad.

We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity.

When people find themselves sinking into a spiritual crisis, many turn to the established religions of Christianity or Judaism -- or Buddhism, or some New Age consolation -- to haul themselves from the depths. This was not an option for me.

My parents were antireligion. My mother was Jewish by birth but a committed nonbeliever. Even my grandmother and her older sister, who had been born in Poland, avoided the subject of religion. Our small family Passover was a dinner without ritual or prayer.

My father, forced into being an alter boy, hated Catholicism and shuddered when he recalled the priests who oppressed him as a child. Anyway, I had no interest in received wisdom or traditional faith. I wanted inspiration of my own, inner knowledge. Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of those writers we study in high school and then forget. When I encountered his essays as an adult, I realized he was speaking to me: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the Universe?" Emerson asked.

"Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

That was what I demanded, "an original relation to the Universe." Nothing abstract, secondhand, or second-rate. No history or somebody else's transcendence. Why should not I also enjoy it? Why did it seem such an impossible goal?

I felt as if I were becoming a ghost, a disembodied survivor from some distant epoch. I realized that if this monotonous materialist culture was "the end of history", as some writers proclaimed -- without spiritual reality, without access to any other level of consciousness or meaning -- then life for me was almost intolerable.

I started experimenting with mushrooms and LSD again. At first, finding these drugs was a surprisingly difficult task in New York. Heroin and cocaine were easily available on any number of street corners, but psychedelics required serious effort and research. Once supplied, I took them at home, in parks, and before visiting grungy East Village bars. On mushrooms, a friend and I perceived Max Fish, a bar on Ludlow Street, to be a medieval pub, full of wounded knights and crippled plague victims, scoundrels, and wastrels. I took a strong dose of LSD with another friend in my apartment on Avenue B in the East Village. We watched, amazed, as music generated rainbow shimmers and our words turned into stained-glass pictures before our eyes. The acid temporarily wiped out my identity. I knew I had chosen to perform some type of experiment on myself, but I couldn’t recall my own name. This was interesting rather than threatening – in another circumstance it might have been terrifying. As the walls trembled like running watercolors, I asked my friend, “Did I, at some point earlier this evening, take a drug that altered my mind?”

A year later, I tried the Amazonian jungle drug ayahuasca – the legendary substance, also know as yage that William Burroughs pursued through South America in the early 1950’s, seeking a visionary cure for his heroin addiction.

Cups of the drug were doled out at a $200 ceremony in a downtown apartment, organized by a couple from California. Before drinking, we were given Adult Depends diapers to wear, and plastic buckets for vomiting. The sour potion produced a few startling insights and images – emerald-green vines wavering in front of a waterfall – and hours of nausea. One woman groaned and retched for hours as the New Age shamans shook rattles and feathers around her. It sounded like she was vomiting out her very being. Her sickness kept me from my own journey.

The ayahuasca trip, while intriguing, left me deeply unsatisfied. My ability to have visions seemed extremely meager. A hardhead, I lacked the capacity to “hallucinate”. Even my dreams were meager gray voids. I wondered if my intense desire to reach the visionary state stemmed from some intrinsic physical flaw.

Most of my friends dismissed my new enthusiasm. Psychedelic drugs were weird and childish, something you did in high school or college and got over. You tried them a bunch of times, had some freaky trips, then moved on to the adult lubricators of social interaction – booze, coke, Valium, pot, heroin. Heroin, above all, was the downtown hipster intoxicant of choice. Over a decade, I knew at least half a dozen people – bright, artistic, confused – who died from overdoses.

Compared to these hipster intoxicants, mushrooms and LSD were seen as silly, somehow regressive, or weak. In my crowd, even Ecstasy was not popular – only alcohol in massive amounts, then heroin and coke, and sometimes a volatile mixture of the three. While I took those substances in social circumstances, I never felt the slightest compulsion about them. I never touched them when I was alone.

I first heard about Iboga at Black Out Books, an anarchist bookstore on Avenue B. The clerk showed me a book on the Ibogaine Project, a twenty-year effort to bring attention to a rare African hallucinogen purported to have a miraculous effect on heroin and cocaine addiction. Ibogaine, I learned, was an underground legend for its anti-addictive powers.

This property was discovered in the early 1960’s by Howard Lotsoff. Lotsoff was a young addict when he read about the African bark somewhere, obtained the powder through a mail-order catalog, and took it for extra kicks.

Instead of an added high, he was sent a stern and somber tour of his entire past. Finding the trip unpleasant, he tried to shake out of it by taking a walk. Crossing a street at one point, he looked back and saw seven copies of himself, freeze-framed, crossing the street behind him. At the end of the trip, he found he had lost interest in heroin, as well as any desire for it – an inadvertent and not even desired side effect.

Lotsoff went on with his life but never forgot this episode. Decades later, he patented the Iboga molecule under the name of Ibogaine, specifically for use in treating drug addiction. After fifteen years of effort, Lotsoff had failed to get his treatment legalized.

If this were all true, then the mythic dimensions of the Ibogaine story were fascinating. A plant from equatorial Africa (the archaic birthplace of humanity) that cured addiction (the modern scourge of African Americans in the inner cities of the United States) by sending addicts on a long psychedelic trip ( a voyage into an archaic spiritual dimension whose existence is dismissed by modern “rationality”).

I personally did not believe in the existence of a “Spirit World.”

Still, I wanted to try it for myself.

DO YOU WANT TO CHEAT ME?

Chapter 3 We drove to The King’s village, forty kilometers of dirt road and red dust-covered jungle away from Lambarene, the riverside town where Albert Schweitzer had his hospital.

Moutamba’s homestead was a compound of modest buildings in a jungle clearing. Children, hens, and roosters wandered freely around dirt paths and chaotic patches of garden. One roofless structure decorated with palm fronds was the Pygmy House, honoring the region’s native inhabitants for discovering le bois sacre, “the sacred wood”, another name for Iboga.

According to legend, the Pygmies used Iboga for centuries before they gave the secret of the plant to the neighboring Bantu tribes who kept attacking them, forcing them deeper into the jungle. The Pygmies showed their enemies how to use Iboga so they would discover their place in the spirit world. The Pygmies knew that once the Bantus made that discovery, they would lose interest in waging wars. If that was the plan, it worked: Gabon remains the only peaceful country in a region of inescapable hostility, tribal conflicts, and mindless genocides. The cult of Bwiti may be the reason for its pacifism.

The Pygmies still live in small bands in Gabon’s most inaccessible jungles. Theoretically, it is possible to have a Pygmy initiation. I will have to save that adventure for another trip. Or more likely a future life.

The stone walls of the temple were painted with crude portraits of Moutamba’s ancestors. A wooden statue of the original Bwiti couple stood at the entry way. In the nineteenth century, Gabonese woodcarvers were renowned for their skill, but their artisanship degenerated after the French colonial occupation and the oil boom, and this statue was of poor quality. I gave the sculpture a careful look. The figures were crude and uncuddly, squared off and dark. A small Iboga plant sprouted up between their legs.

Before arriving in Gabon, I read accounts of Westerners taking Iboga – there were quite a few reports posted on the Internet.* The Bwiti version of Adam and Eve, the cult’s archaic father and mother, often appeared in Iboga visions, even showing themselves to people who knew nothing about Bwiti before taking it. I hoped they would appear to me.

We stayed at the village the night before the ceremony. The analyst, the botanist, The King and I slept in the temple on mattresses under mosquito nets, along with various members of the tribe. People came and went throughout the night. Lizards skittered across the tin ceiling. A small child arrived and nestled close to me. When we awoke, The King gave us what the Bwiti call la liste, the traditional roster of things neophytes buy for the ritual. La liste included a mirror, a tin bucket, a red parrot’s feather, yards of fabric, candles and copal incense, a machete, a woven mat, and supplies for the next day’s feast for the tribe – a live coq du village, and a large quantity of sweet liquors such as rum and cassis.

The analyst, the guide, and I spent the morning driving around the market stalls of Lambarene with three of The King’s sons, whose unsmiling severity as they assisted us made me conscious of the serious nature of the ceremony. Everywhere we went in the virtually all-Black township, people peered into our car with curiosity, and the tight-lipped Bwiti clan seemed proud to parade les blancs around like exotic trophies.

On the way back to the village, the jeep kicked up clouds of the red dust that covered the palms and banana plants along the dirt road. Sitting next to the jet-black young man with a long knife at his belt, the analyst was chatting nervously, talking nonstop. The botanist admitted that he didn’t have a girlfriend. The analyst told him how to improve his love life. She said he should move to New York and take out some personal ads.

“Lately my friend Mark has met so many wonderful men through the New York Review of Books, she shouted over the wind.

The Bwiti stared silently into the jungle.

***

When we returned, The King called us to the temple. “It was good you stayed here last night.” He smiled broadly, flashing white teeth. “Last night, I dreamt that le journaliste -- he pointed at me – “will have wonderful visions. Now it is time. You must give me the rest of the money.”

This was a surprise. We had already handed over the agreed-upon $600 for the ceremony, at least double the fee paid by the average Gabonese. We reminded him of this, but The King started shouting.

“You want to cheat me?” He demanded another $600 from each of us. Our guide tried to bargain with him, but Lieberman seemed to have little authority among the Bwiti. The argument went on for hours. Moutamba raged at us, shouted his demand over and over again. He would go away for a while, then return to scream some more. The young men of the tribe stared at us coldly, as if they were shocked we would challenge The King’s authority.

Later I learned that shamans tend to be tricky when it comes to matters of payment: It is tough to set a price tag on transcendence. During an interval when The King stopped yelling at us, he approached me through Alain, the translator. I was told that, in the future, they didn’t want to work with the botanist anymore.

“You yourself should bring more Americans to him for initiation.” I said I would see what I could do.

Lieberman kept assuring us the Bwiti were pacifist, but the situation seemed out of control. He certainly did not have control over it. Lieberman’s extensive Website gave the impression he had led numerous people through the Bwiti ceremony. When I actually questioned him about it, I learned he had brought only one other customer to The King, a Dutch computer programmer. The Dutchman lost his nerve before the initiation, swallowed a fistful of tranquilizers, and did not eat any Iboga.

Lieberman had also told us that Moutamba had initiated many outsiders. The King presented us a large ledger for foreigners to sign before the ceremony. There were only two other names in the book’s yellowing pages.

We did not feel safe; later on the analyst told me she had never been so terrified in her life. We were completely in their power. While The King ranted that we had cheated them out of money, all of our belongings, our bags and passports and wallets, were stashed in one of their unlocked houses. During one meeting with The King and his retinue, a hunting rifle lay on the table in front of them. As The King screamed at us, one of his sons carefully cleaned it, then loaded it up.

“I’m not sure I like the power dynamics I see here,” the analyst whispered to me.

While the analyst had earlier seemed a karmic curse, I now considered her a good-luck charm. It was easy for me to imagine myself and the botanist burned at the stake by angry Bwiti who felt we were ruining their ritual – we were two pale-faced sad sacks desperate to know the tribal mysteries – but it was impossible that they would hurt the analyst. With her “Free Tibet” T-shirt, Patagonia pants, bug-eyed glasses and incessant chatter, she had a curious quality of indestructibility.

Finally it was decided that the initiation would proceed even though we had cheated them. At the end of the ritual, however, The King would not give us the special oil that bestows a deeper understanding of our visions through the year.

“He himself will not walk with you into the forest and explain to you the myth of the Bwiti, the origin of the plants,” Alain translated. Now Moutamba’s tribe seemed to regard us with contempt. Bwiti no longer seemed quite the “essence of love” Lieberman had described.

It was almost dusk. I was told to sit alone in front of the temple. As night fell, the men of the Bwiti came to me. They were an impressive sight. They had changed from their everyday jeans and T-shirts into tribal dress. Limbs and torsos bare, they wore animal pelts and loincloths, with armbands and necklaces made from shells and feathers. Their jet-black skin was painted with white stripes and dots.

We walked in a single file, away from the simple wooded houses of the village, taking a path through the jungle to the banks of a small stream. Among the Bwiti, I felt absurdly self-conscious: I knew I was not a person to them so much as an archetype. To the Bwiti, I was a white ghost, a pale interloper from the colonial world seeking to return to the spiritual source. I wanted to laugh – the initiation seemed like an act of insane hubris on my part.

Some of the men held torches. Others played drums and rattles and horns in a weirdly humorous march. The young men of the tribe had the sleek and muscular bodies of hunters. White-painted patterns glowed like neon on their bodies in the flickering flames.

Moutamba, wrapped in a leopard skin, ordered me to undress completely and step into the middle of the stream. As I shivered in the icy water, the young man assigned to be my “Bwiti father” poured a soapy liquid over me – a protective spirit-medicine. He smeared a rough red paste across my face and torso. The Bwiti sang while I put on the initiate’s outfit – straps of tanned animal skins and shells looping across my chest and upper arms, a short red tunic. A red feather was twirled into my hair.

It was time to begin eating the Iboga.

TOUCHERS TEACH TOO

Chapter 4 The King raised up the plantain with two hands. My Bwiti father carried this sacrament to me gingerly while the others watched. I looked at the fruit held to my lips; it had been split open and filled with the grey flecks of Iboga powder. The Bwiti men on the hillside sang and drummed a dirgelike melody. By casting off my clothes and putting on the red robe of the initiate, I had symbolically died. After eating the dry powder, I would be reborn.

For years after, whenever I recalled the flavor of Iboga, I shuddered with disgust. The powder tasted like sawdust laced with battery acid – it was entirely revolting, the most bitter substance I ever put in my mouth. Worse yet, the plantain was dry and hard and each bite required extensive chewing. My tongue became dry and swollen, my throat gagged as it tried to reject the vile stuff.

After I finished the plantain, I was fed a few more spoonfuls of the drug mixed with honey. The shaman nodded encouragingly. I fought to keep the stuff down.

"Le journaliste a mange beaucoup, beaucoup," he said.

We returned to the village. My legs had turned rubbery and I felt queasy. In the main courtyard, a few of the men sat around me, playing drums. One of them strummed the m’congo, a one-stringed mouth harp resembling a bow, which has the eerie tonality of a mocking voice. I had been told that the m’congo channels the voices of the Bwiti ancestors. They put a bundle of leaves in my right hand and a whisk of dry thistles in my left hand and told me to keep shaking both in time to the music. The Bwiti were strict about this rule; whenever I stopped shaking the rattles throughout the night, a tribesman would rush up to me and force me to continue.

They fed me more Iboga and brought me, shuddering, into the torch-lit temple. I was unbalanced, confused. They sat me alone at the center, in front of my mirror, which was surrounded by fern leaves and carved figurines. The King and the tribal elders sat to my left, and the rest of the tribe was on benches to my right, perhaps thirty people in all.

The analyst was telling her visions, which seemed to be pouring into her. She lay along a wall of the temple surrounded by Bwiti women who murmured supportively as she recounted what she saw.

“There’s Buddha,” Elaine said, pointing at the ceiling. She turned around. “And I see my dead grandma over there.” She waved at the wall. “Hello, Grandma.”

Around me the atmosphere was tense. The King had decreed I would have “wonderful visions”. I began to realize that not satisfying him was not an option.

A long time passed, and nothing happened.

In the mirror, I saw my face change shape. I seemed to age, lines and wrinkles spread across my skin. Then I appeared younger, my features smoothing out, impacting into the scrunched face of a baby. These effects fluctuated, lasting a few instants. Then I was staring at myself again, a bewildered pale face in tortoiseshell glasses and tribal outfit.

“I don’t see anything,” I said to the impatient tribesmen watching me. Finally, out of the corner of my eye, I had my first vision: A large wooden statue, a dark and faceless golemlike figure formed out of rough logs, walked across the room and sat on the bench. Crossing its legs, it leaned forward, as if to watch me with interest. The vision happened quickly. It seemed utterly real. A moment later, a tiny screen opened in the mirror’s scratched, pockmarked surface. On that screen I looked into the window of my Manhattan apartment. Through the hanging plants, I saw into my living room, which was empty. Then I watched crowds crossing a Broadway intersection, holding umbrellas in the rain. The images were ghost impressions in shades of gray, like images from an old movie; they were clear, totally distinct, but only for a moment. When I tried to study them, they wavered and disappeared.

“If you see a window, you must try to go through it,” The King instructed me through the translator, “And if you meet somebody there you must try to talk to them. Perhaps they have a message for you, some information.”

The Bwiti kept insisting I should relate my visions out loud. I was not ready for that. I had expected whatever I saw to be my own concern. But the Bwiti didn’t sympathize with my Western ideas of privacy.

“Everything you see must be shared,” The King urged. “You might have a message for the tribe, some information.” In my stoned state I was tongue-tied, and I sensed the Bwiti’s rigid disapproval of my silence.

Other images passed quickly before my eyes – a memento mori arrangement of candles, burning skulls, and goblin faces; the figures of women in black dresses stretching out long white arms toward me from the edges of my vision –but when I tried to speak to them, they disappeared.

The King began to shout again. “When is he going to see the fabulous castles? The cities of the Spirits?” he asked, exasperated. He stormed out the room.

“I think they’re going to keep feeding you Iboga until you start talking,” Lieberman whispered.

Meanwhile, I was fighting against pulses that gathered into waves of nausea. I wanted to reach the deepest visionary state. I was also scared. If Iboga was indeed a “super-conscious spiritual entity”, I wasn’t sure whether this entity liked me or hated me. Perhaps it wanted to kill me. I was an outsider, a stranger to its meanings. They brought me outside, where I stood under the cool stars. I remembered King Moutamba saying, earlier, ”Le journaliste a mange beaucoup, beaucoup”. Had I eaten too much?

I was drenched in sweat. My head seemed like a balloon, blown up several times its normal size. I wondered if I was going to die. I retched and vomited green slime into my pail.

When I was no longer sick, the Bwiti took me back inside the temple. They brought me a mat on the hard-packed earth and instructed me to lie down. The King returned to his seat. The Bwiti tribesmen started drumming and singing. The awesome sound filled the temple, pounding against the walls of my skull. I felt an incredible sense of failure as I scorned my own foolishness: Who was I to try to enter the African spirit world?

From time to time the drums and the singing stopped, and The King would make a speech to his tribe, slipping between Bantu and French. I didn’t know either language, but I felt I could understand every nuance of every word he spoke. He was deriding me, making fun of my anatomy, my visionary failures, my weakness – several times I had asked for a blanket to cover myself, and a pillow for my head, but the Bwiti rejected my requests.

“The foreigners, they say they want the true Bwiti initiation,” The King seemed to say with a sneer. “Well, this is what they are getting. Now they complain: ‘I want a blanket, I want a pillow,’ they say. The true Bwiti doesn’t want any comfort.”

Finally, The King took a break from mocking me. The impossibly beautiful music – polyrhythms, call-and-response songs – started up again.

Closing my eyes, I saw brightly colored patterns. Spiraling plant-like forms and dancing geometries swirled with the music. I fell into a trance, floating with the Bwiti songs. I drifted into a new phase of the trip.

Piece by piece, the pattern of my past began to flare up in my mind. For the next several hours, I forgot about the tribesmen watching me. I was witnessing a “memory theater”, a scrupulous replaying of all the elements of my early life – my parents’ separation, my father’s absence from my childhood, the imprint of my mother’s loneliness and depression, my own solitude and love of reading, the many months I spent in a hospital bed at the age of eleven with a bacterial infection in my spine. I went back to the secret, baroque sources of childhood nightmare and fantasy – the primal fear of the monsters under the bed, the cave of darkness inside the closet, I saw the desperate, desolate parts of my life and the flashes of power and invention that were also mine. Separate from myself, yet enclosed within myself, I followed the traces of the being that I was, that was given to me, as it unfolds over time.

Laid out for me was the entire, intricate process of my self-development. The process was complex yet ultimately organic. The extension of the self was, I realized, a natural process, akin to the blossoming of a plant. While a plant extends towards the sun throughout its life, human beings evolve internally. We rise up and flourish, or become stunted, involuted, as we react to the forces that press against us. Our growth takes place in the invisible realm of our mental space, and the unreachable sun we rise toward is knowledge – of the self and the Universe.

Henry James once described human consciousness as “a helpless jelly poured into a mold”. Iboga compelled me to perceive the exact shape of that mold; at the same time, it allowed me to escape that sense of helplessness. I felt a mingling of wonder, sorrow and freedom. By letting me perceive the shape of my past self, Iboga also seemed to be freeing me from the burden of that past. The action of the drug actually was – as I had heard it described but wouldn’t believe – the equivalent of ten years of psychoanalysis compacted into one interminable night.

For a brief time, I mulled on my drinking habits. I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic, but since high school I had relied on booze as a tool for socializing. For the first time I fully realized the negative impact that alcohol had on my relationships, my work, on me in general. Alcohol fired up my id, sent me staggering across endless parties and barroom floors in an aggressive, sometimes successful, pursuit of sex. But drinking was holding me back – it was like a weight I was dragging around. It was keeping me from my own self-development. I saw myself as a drunken idiot at parties, cycled through many nights where I drank to blot myself out. There was a dark tinge of shame and self-disgust entwined in my overuse of alcohol. I realized I didn’t need to do it anymore.

Through Iboga, I recognized my existing self as the product of all the physical and psychological forces that had acted upon me. Yet there seemed to be something beyond all of it, something that was “mine,” an energy projected from outside of my biographical destiny. That energy was the self – and the self’s tremendous capacity for transformation.

The trip turned into a cinematic cyclone, whirling images and scenes at high speed. A series of unknown houses appeared, ghostly gray suburban landscapes I had never seen before. I drifted down into them as they faded away.

Impressions of old girlfriends dispersed like fog, their bodies dancing away from me into the ether. I saw the sign for a restaurant, Teacher’s Too, a childhood haunt. In its heyday, Teacher’s Too (across the street from the original Teacher’s) was a maroon-colored meeting place for publishing types, professors, the lost liberal intelligentsia of the Upper West Side.

Teacher’s Too was the place where I met my first serious girlfriend, after I dropped out of college. I arrived early for a lunch date, and started to chat with the restaurant’s cute hostess. She was sipping a Bloody Mary at the bar, wearing a plastic hat for St. Patrick’s Day. She was giggly, vivacious – it was as if an electrical current flowed around her: We had met once at a party during high school when she was dating a friend of mine. After that chance meeting, we started seeing each other, and stayed together for three years.

The letters of the restaurant sign peeled off one by one in small squares, as though they were pieces from a board game. The squares spun around in my mental space with a clicking sound. It was like a cheap special effect from an old movie. The letters reassembled, rebus-like, to spell out a phrase that was either, “Touchers Teach Too” or “Touchers Teach Two”.

This ambiguous message, this telegraphic koan, seemed to contain a code about my future relationships. There was a sense of reconciliation and hope in the phrase, but what did it mean? It seemed to suggest the possibility of having children – two to be exact – an option I had rarely considered, certainly not at the time of my trip to Gabon, when I had no money, no girlfriend, and no prospects for either.

The drumming and singing became deafening in the low-ceilinged temple. In my altered state the songs were awesome in their beauty. There was a strain of self-aware humor in the melodies. Intricate rhythms unfolded organically as if the music, channeled by the Bwiti, was emanating from the plant’s essence. I realized the depth of the tribe’s bond with this plant that showed them things. I felt how complete their culture was in itself. So complete that no outsider could disturb it. The music expressed the botanical symbiosis, essence of the Bwiti’s pride and power.

Late that night the Bwiti made us rise and dance with them. The men tried to teach me the basic steps – hard for me to follow in my state of stoned self-consciousness and my sensitivity to The King’s disapproval. Then we sat down to watch as each man in the tribe danced around the temple, whirling a torch, scattering shadows across the walls like living forms. They executed their steps with expert grace and gravity.

“After you take Iboga you will know what Bwiti is,” The King had told me the day before the ritual. I was still trying to understand. Perhaps Iboga opened a symbiotic link between plant and human, a doorway for interspecies communication. But if that were so, who or what was communicating from the other side? I was left with an impression of contact with some other intelligence or entity existing in a realm outside of our own. I wondered if what my guide said was true, that in Bwiti, like Buddhism, there is no ultimate deity, just an endless play of forms, vast hierophanies of Spirits, spinning like pinwheels across the Eternal Void.

I knew intellectually, that tribal groups attribute spirit and sentience to plants. Claude Levi-Strauss wrote about this in The Savage Mind, giving some examples of a universal phenomenon: “When a medicine man of eastern Canada gathers roots or leaves, he is careful to propitiate the soul of each plant by placing a tiny offering at its base.”

My Iboga experience tested the limits of my own beliefs: How could eating a bitter bark take me on such a profound and carefully structured journey through my past, into my future? Could a plant have a “soul” or an intelligence? I had never taken this idea seriously before.

At dawn, the Bwiti led us outside to watch the sunrise. Pink light filtered over the palm fronds and fruit trees, across the dusty disorder of the village. They sang, and we sang with them. The analyst and I staggered woozily as the ritual ended, but The King immediately began shouting at us again.

“Now you have been initiated, you give me presents of money!” he screamed. “I demand more money for the visions I have shown you!” We decided to escape his shouts and check into a hotel in Lambarene. This required another long and tense negotiation.

”J’ai eu des visions de ruine terrible,” The King shouted.

Because le journaliste had not seen or told all of his visions, he explained, we would be in mortal danger if we did not stay another night. As the botanist insisted we were leaving anyway, The King tried to make a fast bargain. Introducing the analyst to the father of a nine year-old girl, he suggested that, instead of paying more, she take the man’s daughter and raise her in America. This was a crude but pragmatic psychology on the part of The King: while tripping, the analyst told the Bwiti she regretted not having a child, but she didn’t expect an instant chance to rectify the situation.

We convinced one of The King’s sons to drive us to the Ogobue Palace, a placid hotel overlooking the river. In my hotel room, I found the Iboga trip was still going on. I was wide awake and without hunger although I had not slept or eaten in over thirty hours. Lying in bed, an eerie strain of Bwiti music returned to my ears. I watched a parade of fleeting phantasms that drifted across cracks in the white wall. Solemn men in funny hats and antique coats marched away, melting into the plaster, trailed by fading rhythms. I realized these were the “ancestor shades,” ghost-impressions of my forefathers, a vision that the Iboga trance often produced, according to accounts I had read.

I descend from Europeans – Polish Jews and Irish Catholics – and know little about my ancestors, my history. As the figures paraded across the wall, I wished I could linger among them, see them more clearly.

So faint – so quick – they melted away. ************

from the book,
BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD,
by Daniel Pinchbeck