“TALKING TO THE TREES”

Iboga seminar

It’s been three weeks since my Bwiti initiation. Some memories disappeared, others reappeared.

I thank the person that told me about iboga first and that inspired me to go to the Drôme, in France, to meet Mallendi the Nganga. I dedicate this testimony to all of those that feel lost, those who feel like dying and to Milonga.

How are things on earth ? Spring has a particular taste and glow for me this year. I can hear/read/feel the messages that plants are sending me. As soon as the second day, I walk around the place where the initiation happened, primroses and violets scattered in the fields or on the side of trails talked to me in colors. Despite the overcast weather and the melting snow that was falling, they glowed like as if it was a sunny day. At the bend in the roads, I came across my brother, the traveling pine tree. A little bit further I screamed at the death and cried on the beech trees that had just been cut down on the other side of the mountain. Walking down the fields, the oak trees still dry from the winter educated me. The younger ones made fun of me and were dancing. I continue to communicate with the plants that surround me here in Bruxelles; I observe, never so astounded and happy, the flowering and the arrival of the leaves. Every day, I look forward to crossing the park to go to work in Forest.

I came to the Bwiti initiation with two questions, how to let go of the will to control ? How to open my heart more ? I received answers beyond my questions.

I saw myself very old, near death, and very young, still nursing, alone on the cold ground. I took this baby in my arms and warmed him up, played with him and loved him. I met Margot, my grandfather’s mare, dead or sold when I was a year and a half or two years old. I didn’t have any conscious memories of it, only pictures of me in my stroller under the nostrils of the horse. I saw it since the first night. In the morning, while walking in the woods, the burnt carcass of a horse appeared to me in a pile of branches and logs. I understood through these visions that this disappeared horse was at the origins of the will to control and aggression that made it such that I was always “over other people’s place” and not “my place”.

The music that the Nganga was playing (musical arc and harp) was of an infinite richness and softness. The bard played the music while iboga told me the story of the earth, a very ancient story, sad and cherishing. Mallendi played alone but the sound of the musical arc

divided itself: I could hear four different instruments. Mallendi had me imagine thousands of little microscopic ants and that each one of them was cleaning one of my cells dancing to the rhythm of the music. They are the ones who pushed me into a regenerating dance, in the middle of the room, in front of the musicians. I discovered a flexibility and precision unknown to this day in this dance.

The second night, I had a hard time accepting my white like flour face in the mirror. In order to escape it, I played the spoiled child that got mad screaming insanities in the bucket and throwing it in front of him because he couldn’t vomit like all the others. In the mirror, there was an unbearable old man, peculiar looking and self-important. The fear of aging, the fear of death, it was all there. And nothing else. Except sometimes a metallic and assassin brilliance that crossed the eyes, the shark’s eye. At the same time that I was having this nauseous and infernal vision, memories came to my spirit at record speed, faster than the first night; so fast that I did not have the time to connect them to a story. A little bit like the content of an immense silo where nobody could recognize the lives or the people behind the objects even them with no connection among themselves. All I could do was throwing things away, throwing away, throwing away…I wonder what I was doing with all that trash in my head.

At the end of the second night I started to worry. I was suppose to rebuild: I only saw myself, visiting and throwing things away (I didn’t even throw up). I could hear myself ask Mallendi, without hesitation and surprised by my own question, “All that I have thrown away has left an impression in my neurons, what should I do for this structure to disappear as well, so that my brain can find it’s original configuration ?” in other words, to find an image that fits the engine I am using now, I stumped out the folders or programs, how can I suppress the registry where they are located ? He answered me. I took his advice…

I then found an immeasurable sweetness. My poor run down heart opened up to me. My look changed, heavier eye lids, became softer. Out of my mouth came a soft breath right from my heart. Oh, my poor heart! It’s like I found a long lost friend. This naked heart, so shy, seemed so fragile, I had put it under lock. It waited for years to emerge, to manifest itself.

For some unknown reason, I walked the path lay down by iboga backwards. I mainly built during the first night and destroyed the second. That night, I went through what the others went trough on the first night; only then I understood their weakness, the feeling of emptiness and, for some, their fears to start a second night with iboga.

In my body too, the plant went backwards. Not having vomited, the phlegm came out the other digestive extremity. This distinction didn’t stop me from feeling a great sympathy for my companions. I can consider them brothers or sisters with no difficulty, even though fraternity always made me feel uneasy even if it was posted in the pediment of republican schools. To throw up together as a foundation for living together ? I certainly know that I felt great joy hearing them vomit to the point that the memories of it still make me laugh, like I laughed at the first vomits of each night of the initiation. So you understand my frustration for not having been able to participate in those emotions.

Since the second day, I have had the feeling to have received this precious treasure. I still feel an immense gratitude. Thank you God, Africa has kept this secret, beyond the wars, slavery and colonization, and puts it at the reach of us ignorant occidentals. We might have thought about everything but we have left our bodies far behind. Losing this elementary relationship, we have detached ourselves from the earth and continue destroying it, unconscious. The ancient landscape of the Gran Sabana, in Venezuela, had told me when I met it last winter: “the earth is old, she has carried you, humans, for more than a million years, the time has come for you to take care of her”. The grounds of Africa, through the iboga root, told me the same.

How ? I think the plant has directly communicated with my neuro-vegetative network. I can now make mine, the hypothesis of a researcher elaborated from taking Ayahuasca : the DNA of the plant communicates with the DNA of humans through light emissions. This hypothesis is of great importance for our neuroscience which stops at the material support (physical and chemical) of thought. The aspect of the light emissions that come across us is maybe what makes the difference between thought and conscience. And the location of this conscience is not the brain.

Us Europeans have thought about everything or almost…but our conscience is one of an adolescent badly brought up. Iboga has allowed me to change paradigm, value scale, to reconsider the order of things and civilizations.

Alain Marcel

May 15^th 2004

Remarques