The Weekend Vigilante: My Spiritual Iboga Experience

Hello from Anarchapulco,

Those who have followed my writing for years know that I have publicly gone through a multitude of changes in my quest for finding truth.

When The Dollar Vigilante first began I'd often regale my experiences traveling the world and pushing my lifestyle to the extremes.  I'd impart how I'd be involved in some of the most ridiculous situations as I tried to push every limit and stand up to state power, rules and regulations (like the time I escaped from jail in St. Kitts twice in one night).

I then went through a period where I recognized that something was missing in my life, and that there was much more to know that I didn't know, and began searching for it including doing ayahuasca twice.

That experience and many more helped me to develop a lot and it was just last month that I recounted how the experiences in my life in the last year had led me to a higher power that I didn't even know fully existed.

In the last month, however, I began to feel exhausted.  Just covering this fall crisis period throughout the entire summer was tiring enough on top of everything else I've been doing.  This exhaustion made me feel a bit lost in my search for truth.  It was then that something led me to look into iboga.

It is, according to many, the most powerful psychedelic plant on Earth, much stronger than ayahuasca.

Some may think, “psychedelic”?  Is the dollar vigilante himself turning into some sort of tripping hippie?

I would respond that if you think experiencing the amazingly powerful, millennia old healing plants like ayahuasca or iboga is akin to going to a Grateful Dead concert in a tie-died shirt and doing some mushrooms then you are completely wrong.

In fact, I would recommend to the great majority of people that they think long and very hard before trying ayahuasca… and iboga is even more extreme!

These plants should not be attempted for fun (some people even die during the iboga experience).  Because, first of all, they aren't fun, at all!

Ayahuasca put me through two torturous experiences where I had to face myself for hours of the deepest introspection possible until I was literally begging for death to make it stop.

Iboga put me through two entire days of the same process this last week.

IBOGA

I had been looking for ways to both a) reach a higher spiritual understanding and b) reach a much higher level of personal development.

Having already gone through the torturous ayahuasca experience twice in quest of the same two things I was looking for a different way… and the word “iboga” kept popping up on my screen as I did that search.

I had been feeling weak.  I felt scattered.  Disconnected.  Depressed.  And, worst of all, I couldn't think of a way to snap myself out of it.  That is a really awful feeling.  It's one thing to feel that way but another thing completely to not have any answers for how to get out of those feelings.  A feeling of total desperation.

And so I emailed the closest iboga retreat center to me in Mexico (of course iboga is illegal, like almost everything in the “land of the free”) and was able to get in for a week long retreat last week.

Located in the mountains about an hour south of Mexico City I arrived and was met by a number of amazing people and shamans.  I told them how I was feeling and told them also that I was beginning to seek alcohol again as a way to self-medicate and how I did not want to go down that road anymore… ever.

The 70 year old man who ran the retreat, and who was originally from the north-eastern US who had picked me up in a 50 year old pickup truck with 1980s Virginia plates on it gave me a discerning but empathetic look as he was deciding whether to give me access to this plant that he so highly revered and for which so many are in need of.

I finished trying to explain to him that I've been, in effect, in a war for the last five years.  A spiritual and real war against what I see as being an evil falling over this planet (manifested in the form of government and central banks) and I needed the strength to keep fighting.

“Ah, you are an anarchist eh?  Me too, third generation.”

He then looked around at his team and gave the nod, “We dose him tomorrow.”

He told me to get some rest and get prepared.

There were only two others at the retreat.  One of them was a young man from Seattle who called himself a “psycho-naut” who was there to experience the world's most powerful psychedelic as part of his spiritual and healing quest after a tramautic childhood that left him living on the street and lost.

It was funny because in my first ayahuasca experience the very first person I met when I walked into the room said, “Hey, you're the dollar vigilante!  I'm a big fan!”

This time, the young man said, “You look so familiar.  Were you on Max Keiser?”

I told him I was and that Max was a friend and he then said, “Ah yes, the dollar vigilante!”

The other man who was there was from Mexico City, in his 30s, had a family and had been doing crack cocaine every day for the last 15 years.  Something, he said, that started as something fun and helped him to relieve his stress and had now turned into a life-and-death burden. His brother had paid the $3,000 cost as a last-chance for him to overcome his addiction (which I have found out over time is never about the addiction itself, it is always a reflection of some deeper trauma).

As he told me with sorrow in his eyes that this was his only hope I realized why the retreat owner was so discerning in allowing me space in the retreat… iboga is proven to, instantly, upon taking it, remove addiction from all opium-related substances such as heroin, crack, cocaine, morphine, oxycontin and others.

I awoke in the morning and we began the ceremony including spending more than an hour in a temazcal (aka. sweat lodge).  That was an experience all on its own!

A very low roofed clay hut that they fill with red hot rocks and pour water on them until it reaches an almost unbearable level of heat and humidity.

Interestingly, they asked us to say our intentions at the beginning and I said with a quivering voice, “I want to get closer to God, learn how to heal myself and heal myself so I can help heal as many others as possible.”

It is only as I write this that I looked up the prayer they said during the process, which I didn't fully understand as the shaman seemed to speak some indigenous dialect:

Grandfather, Mysterious One,
We search for you along this
Great Red Road you have set us on.
Sky Father, Tunkashila,
We thank you for this world.
We thank you for our own existence.
We ask only for your blessing and for your instruction.

Grandfather, Sacred One,
Put our feet on the holy path that leads to you,
and give us the strength and the will
to lead ourselves and our children
past the darkness we have entered.
Teach us to heal ourselves,
to heal each other and to heal the world.

Let us begin this very day,
this very hour,
the Great Healing to come.
Let us walk the Red Road in Peace.

After an hour I exited on my knees through the small portal to then choke down some iboga bark and then took the iboga in a liquid form.

“Tastes better than ayahuasca, doesn't it?” said the retreat owner.

As I held back my gag reflex I gave him an unbelieving look.

I then settled into a bed and they told me that for the next few days I would barely be able to move or function and gave me a bell for when I needed help in going to the bathroom and checked my vital signs every few hours for the next few days as I entered into…….

Well, I have no way of explaining it.  And that is usually what anyone who tries to describe what happens says when they try to explain it.

During the process you have no ability to understand time (and as I have learned, time is just an idea anyway… it doesn't exist – watch this as example).  So, I don't know how long it lasted but my first experiences seemed like I saw every moment of my entire life in a matter of minutes.  I felt every painful moment, every joyful moment, everything… it was truly overwhelming.

Iboga comes from Africa and is still used to this day by some tribes as a way to experience the space between life and death.

Many people who have endured near-death experiences all say that they saw their entire life in a matter of a few minutes.  That is the best way I can describe what I experienced.

After that I experienced all manner of things that I can't fully describe.  And like with ayahuasca there seemed to be hours and hours of deep, deep, grueling self-introspection.  It pushes you so far that numerous times I begged for death as it was just too exhausting to spend days pouring over every aspect of your life and honestly look at what you need to change in yourself.

The third day was spent with shamans and is mostly a blur as you don't sleep at all for the entire two days you are on iboga… and I didn't sleep the third night either… nor the fourth!

But, after the fourth day, even though I hadn't slept in four days, I never felt better.

It was excruciating and torturous for the first few days but by the fourth day I found I didn't want to sleep as I felt so re-energized and excited about what I had discovered not only about myself but the universe itself.  It felt like I had been reborn.

Unlike with my ayahuasca experiences I didn't walk away mostly confused about what had just happened.  In this case, I walked away feeling like I had been given a new lease on life.

Although, I am sure it will take months to fully process everything I experienced.

THE POWER WITHIN YOU

Aside from the iboga experience just spending a few days contemplating life up in the mountains and speaking with shamans and others in search of knowledge and consciousness awakening felt incredible.

I poured through the books they had on hand.  My favorite being Eckhart Tolle's, “The Power of Now“.

If you don't know of Eckhart Tolle, enjoy this short video where he explains the divine nature of the universe.

My consciousness awakening has shown me that the great majority of humans in this world, including myself previously, are completely unaware of the incredible power and potential held inside each of us.

Most will forever search for outside stimuli to find happiness when it is, in fact, right there inside of each of us.  And once we realize the power we have we will stop giving our power away (in the form of “voting” for someone to “fix” our problems).  As well, we create our own reality.  This may sound like mumbo-jumbo to you but I can fully attest through my experiences in the last few years that this is absolutely true.

If you don't know what I am talking about I highly recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's book.

When I first began The Dollar Vigilante and, subsequently, Anarchast, I didn't see how they would end up all being related to a spiritual quest of enlightenment of humanity.

The Dollar Vigilante was started to awaken people to the financial slavery they have been subjugated into and how not only to escape those chains but profit from it.  Anarchast was begun to spread the word on the importance of not wanting nor needing someone to rule you and how if enough people do that it will change the world instantly.

These are ways to enlighten people.  And now I have realized that the end goal of everything is to help bring others to understand that they are an expression of God.  They are their own ruler.  And by becoming aware of this and connecting with this we all can attain the highest level of happiness and peace.

And if enough of us can realize this the light that will be shone will extinguish all darkness.  No amount of darkness can make a sunlit room dark.  And just one candle can make the darkest room light.

You have the power within you to change this world.  Let your light shine and you may be very surprised to see how you can not only change your own reality but the reality of others towards a world much more filled with peace and prosperity than we've seen in our lifetimes.

At our conference, Anarchapulco, coming this February, many of the speakers are some of the most profound speakers on these subjects, including Zen Gardner of ZenGardner.com and Max Igan of Surviving the Matrix.

In fact, the owner of the iboga retreat is considering coming to the conference to speak on the power of iboga and I may soon have him on Anarchast to discuss it.

Time is running short for the people who want to control the world and keep humanity enslaved and they won't go down without a fight.

But they need our consent and our willingness to give them our power to continue.  Have no fear of this as fear is how they control us.

Realize the key to a better world lies in the place you least suspected… inside of you.