Amateur Zen & The Art Of Average Archery from Warrior Poet on Vimeo.

JRE #195 – Aubrey Marcus, Brian Redban from JoeRogan on Vimeo.

PODCAST #167 – Aubrey Marcus, Brian Redban from JoeRogan on Vimeo.

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WPP 3 – Whitney Miller (Miss Texas), Nick “The Ghost” Gonzalez, Aubrey Marcus from Warrior Poet on Vimeo.

In our virgin video podcast we bring in professional fighter Nick “The Ghost” Gonzalez and Whitney Miller (Miss Texas) to discuss fighting, pageanting, and ultimately find the parallels between being ‘in the zone’ whatever your endeavor. The podcast closes with the game called ‘The Cube’, a great way to break the ice or learn about someone’s subconscious psychology. Please follow our gracious guests @nicktheghost and @whitneymiller10 and look for them on TV! We are still improving our technical prowess, and I mean ‘we’ in the King Louis royal sense of the word, so bear with me!

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It couldn’t have come at a time more hostile toward the Christian/Catholic faith. I was in college and seething like Christopher Hitchens or Bill Maher with less than subtle contempt for ‘the faith’. Why? Well for starters I had been to a dungeon in Italy that housed the horrors of the Inquisition. I knew the story of Giordano Bruno. I was dating a girl whose sexuality was crushed when her boyfriend took her virginity and called her a sinner and a whore. I had a good friend who was tortured with catholic guilt every week for making out with pretty girls at a party. I had read Nietzsche’s “AntiChrist”, Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian” and I was determined to write a more devastating book than both of them combined.

But there I was… Sitting on the floor of a clay adobo and coming to the realization that one of the most important tenets of Christianity was real. There was a heaven and a hell. Of course, they got the details all wrong but after that moment my views changed a little bit. Not enough to go to church, but enough to tolerate it as a you would a weed in your neighbor’s garden–The owner would be better off without it, but mayhaps it was not my concern.

The journey to this powerful realization started with a mushroom tea brewed with care by a compassionate shaman. It was my first encounter with psilocybin, or any entheogen for that matter, and it was this experience that laid the foundation for my experiential beliefs. A decade later it is not easy to remember the exact sensations and thoughts that were going through my mind as I took my maiden voyage to the other side, but the visions and truths are still as crisp as the moment they materialized. While my mind detached from its earthly confines I had a vision of walking in a field of wheat. It was very much the scene from Gladiator, except I could feel it. Every wispy golden stalk that brushed my hand was like the ecstatic caress of God Itself–only i didn’t believe in God! Then slowly the wheat field faded, and the ‘aha’ moment came when my physical senses started to dissolve.

The sensation of my breath slowed to the point where the air circulated through me without effort from my lungs. The feeling of my back pressed against the ground melted into nothing. The echo of my heartbeat became a drum in the distance. Then all sensation ceased. Somehow this was not frightening, only liberating. I felt consciousness lift from my body and hover several feet above where the liquid meat sack I was so attached to lay. At that moment I was hit with a massive download of truth and clarity that would have me spending the next 16 hours wide-eyed in the night, feverishly putting ink to my revelations on the pages of my journal.

Most importantly was my first experiential discovery that we were comprised of at least two parts, one being a non-physical entity that I had no better word for than ‘soul’ and the other being the ‘body’. It was inescapably clear that the soul, while linked to the body for the duration of one’s life, survived the death of that body and carried with it the consciousness and memory of one’s life. But there was another phenomenon that happens when the soul leaves the body. One that lead me to understand the true nature of heaven and hell: perfect clarity.

At first, the idea of perfect clarity may not seem that revolutionary. This is because we arrogantly assume that we are all operating currently with close to perfect clarity. This delusion is precisely what allows us to stray so far from it! When I say perfect clarity what I mean is a perfect St. Peter / God type of clarity. A clarity that will tell you the right and wrong of every action you did, from the piece of trash you littered that caused 15 people to be bummed out when they went on their nature walk, to how you treated your first girlfriend during your break up.

You review these actions and deeds with a perfect fairness, and a true understanding of your motivations. Your life is on trial and you, a perfect judge, are in charge of the proceedings. Inevitably what happens for most people is probably a mix of both pride and disappointment at the way one lived. If you lived largely an honorable life, putting good into the world wherever possible, a great pride will swell in the core of your soul. You will re-live the smiles of your sons and daughters, the laughter of your friends, the gratitude of those you have helped, and the appreciation for those who mourn your loss. When you have finished looking back on the life you lived, you enter the bliss that is the freedom from earthly struggle. This is heaven.

However, if you have lived wickedly all of the rationalizations and excuses that have allowed you to do so will become completely transparent. Like a horror movie, you will be pinned with eyelids open and forced to watch every evil deed and the pain that it caused to the life around you. The feelings of intense shame and guilt would be greater than the physical pains of any fire and brimstone hell.

Imagine a man who beats his wife. In that man’s head he justifies his actions by convincing himself that she deserved the beating. Either she was lazy, or she was lusty, whatever his reasoning may be, it allows him to hide from the truth of his deeds. When the soul leaves the body the lens he carefully built to sustain his actions gets yanked away and he sees himself for the monster that he is. He sees his knuckles smashing into the soft flesh of a scared girl that wants desperately to love him… A girl that he swore to protect. A girl that opened her womb to him, trusted him with her safety and her life. He sees this hurt girl and the pain–physical, emotional, and psychological that he inflicted on her throughout life. He sees that he had a chance to help her, to make her life better while enriching his own, or perhaps just to leave her be, and he could not do it. He failed. And there is no way to change it. All he can do is mourn, and cry, and wish that he could put himself in her place. He wants to smash his own head against a wall, to pull his hair, to take his own life perhaps. But he can’t… All he can do is recall what he did as he cries a million tears that never fall on his cheek. This is hell.

But unlike the Bible’s hell, there is forgiveness. Likely it comes when your own torment equals the pain you caused, and you open yourself to forgiveness or offer yourself to the possibility of a redemptive re-incarnation. Also notably differing from the Biblical hell, are the sinners tormented by healthy sex drives. When your soul leaves your body, you are not gonna be concerned about that time you hooked up with that sorority girl in her dorm room, or busted out your fleshlight. It is absolute fairness, based on a perfect morality, and humans are sexual beings.

What makes life interesting is free will, which is truly made possible only by forfeiting the perfect clarity of death, while in life. When we are incarnated we ‘forget’ the truth of the existence beyond, and that gives us a clean slate from which to operate. If we did not forget, we would be restricted by a built in set of morality. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing? But for whatever reason that is the way it goes. There are a lot of traditions that talk about Karma, but that is not anything that I have clarity on from any of my journeys. All I have learned is that we do re-incarnate and that we forget every time that we do. I hope that in my future explorations I will learn more about this process.

But don’t leave it up to me to figure out and tell you. Go seek it yourself! That is the difference between experiential based spirituality and faith based spirituality. Everything I am telling you here, you can go and verify. It may not be easy, but it can be done. I am not special in any way– Just blessed with an opportunity, the right connections, and the means to explore the realms beyond. So don’t take my word for it. Find a shaman, or forge your own way and discover it for yourself. That way when you pass from this life, you’ll be ready for what comes next.

64 Minutes in Length

Please bear with us as we gain mastery of the technical aspects of podcasting. We will be working to improve sound quality for #2 and hopefully be broadcasting live. In the meantime, let me know what you think! Thanks for your patience and support!

In comparing Iboga and Ayahuasca the most difficult part is finding any common ground at all. They are as different as two experiences could be, though each of them are master medicines in their own right. The Iboga experience is completely unique in the realm of psychedelics, almost to the point where it should be a part of a different category. The intense stimulant effect of the Ibogaine alkaloid is largely responsible for the separation. Whereas most psychedelics either heighten normal senses or make them seem to disappear altogether, during the Iboga experience you are acutely aware of the physical discomfort of the body. Rapid heart rate, persistent nausea, intense dizziness, buzzing in the ears, and the stern voice of the Truth–This lasts for 24 hours strong. There were some people who didn’t sleep for 3 days after taking Iboga. Contrastingly, Ayahuasca arrives with a warm buzz, brings the fireworks, a purge, and then 8-10 hours later a peaceful connectedness that allows you a full night’s sleep. Looked at this way, Ayahuasca may seem preferable. However, the sheer psychobytes of content downloaded from Iboga is unrivaled, and part of what makes that medicine so incredibly powerful.

Going Farther vs. Going Deeper

The Ayahuasquero shamans speak of going father–To explore dimensions beyond our own, and this may well be a function of the DMT. With the strong correlation between natural DMT release during physical death, DMT seems to be a gateway to the realms beyond the physical. I experienced several of these dimensions in an epic Ayahuasca journey and can attest to the ‘otherness’ of these realms. Those who smoke DMT also generally report the feeling of seeing something far beyond one’s self.

The Iboga Bwiti shamans speak of going deeper, not farther. They believe that their medicine accesses the infinite nature of the soul inside of us, and that soul’s infinite knowledge that extends all the way to the beginning of time. In my entire 24 hour encounter with Truth, there was never the feeling that I was accessing anything outside of myself. It is simply that the self I was accessing was virtually omniscient and had our best interest at heart!

Content Delivery

In the Ayahuasca experience content is delivered to you largely through images or encounters with other beings. The images then can lead to greater introspection, but it takes some insight at times to understand what the medicine was trying to tell you. Perhaps this is because there is a translation issue between the dimensions. How does the non-physical dimension communicate with the physical mind? As the brain scrambles to form its own Rosetta stone to translate the input it is receiving, strange imagery is often the result.

In the Iboga experience there is no translation issue because it is you talking to yourself. If you can’t understand yourself you are in big trouble. People have called Iboga your ‘stern father’ and this is due to the nature of what Iboga tells you. It will very bluntly explain to you how you have been fucking up, and tell you to shape up! And for many of us, that may sound like our father, but really it is just your true self trying to get your mind in line with what would be best for your destiny.

Lasting Effects (Stickiness, Retention, Aftermath)

One of the problems with the Ayahuasca experience is that it is entirely dream-like in its presentation, and almost every ceremony takes place after dusk. So after you finish your dream-like journey it is about 2-3 AM, at which time you fall asleep and have actual dreams. So by the time you wake up the next morning the lines between reality and the dream state becomes blurred. You start to wonder, was that really real or just some drug induced dream? This little window allows our old enemies doubt and fear, or what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance, to creep in your mind and start to undermine your experience. But what is working in your favor with Ayahuasca is that you feel fucking GREAT the next day. You feel connected, clean, happy and strong. These feelings on their own battle fear and doubt, as you can simply ask yourself “when have I ever felt this good?” Anything that makes you feel that good must be real. I felt like I was on a spritual high for several weeks after my Ayahuasca journeys.

The Iboga is the direct opposite experience. First of all, you are awake for AT LEAST 24 hours from the onset of your journey. Often times people are awake for 48 hours. So there are no pesky dreams to confuse you. But the experience is so lucid and non-dreamlike anyway that I doubt even if you did find a way to sleep that you would have the blending effect that takes place with Ayahuasca. The problem with Iboga however is that staying awake and being under the influence of such a heavy stimulant temporarily crushes your serotonin, GABA and adrenals so it is easy to feel agitated, sad, and weak on the comedown. Those feelings are breeding grounds for fear and doubt, so you have to be careful not to undermine your own experience out of weakness. Once you recover some sleep it is very easy to assimilate your new wisdom into your life, but that lasting high that I experienced from Ayahuasca wasn’t present. People wouldn’t be able to ‘sense’ a change in my aura, but those who know my behavior will certainly notice that I have changed my self destructive and self-limiting habits.

The Physical Cleanse

Both of these medicines have remarkable claims of physical healing. While I cannot speak first-hand to any miraculous cures, the mechanism of action seems to make a lot of sense. Both medicines are purgative, although seemingly quite different. The Iboga makes you want to vomit, but it really felt to me more like my body was just trying to vomit up the Iboga as much as the anything else. With the Ayahuasca you feel like there is a little clean up crew at work in your organs, squeezing out all of the bad stuff, the decay, the bacteria, and then pushing that back into your bowels and stomach to be disposed. Sometimes you vomit, but always you are going to have some foul diarrhea. With Iboga there was no diarrhea, and actually to the contrary, it may have led to some mild constipation. But what Iboga does is completely re-tune your physical body. They say that cancers, viruses and illnesses have a different frequency than healthy cells in the body. This makes sense, as these pathogens are rapidly dividing and devouring at a hyperactive rate. If your entire body is forced to adapt to a new frequency, the disruption may cause enough of a weakness in the invaders that the immune system can get the upper hand and fuck shit up like it is supposed to. If I had to pick one thing that made me feel healthier though? Ayahuasca wins.

Preparation & Pageantry

“Dieta, dieta.” I can still hear Maestro Orlando repeating this word to me over and over. For the Ayahuasquero diet is a crucial element of the medicine. What you eat prior to the ceremony, or as importantly, what you do NOT eat plays a huge role in what you receive from the medicine. No dairy, no sugar, no red meat, no alcohol. Those are the basic rules with some variations in between. For Iboga, other than skipping dinner the night of the ceremony and staying away from other stimulants like coffee the day of, you are pretty much free to do what you wish.

As far as setting intent, the medicines not surprisingly also have different approaches. For Ayahuasca one is encouraged to think about two or three topics that you would like to explore, or teachings you would like to receive from the ceremony. Generally, one way or another you will almost always find that you receive what you are looking for, though it rarely comes to you in a direct manner. For the Iboga ceremony you are asked to write a list of specific questions of unlimited length that will be read to you for answering at the start of the ceremony. The answers come from your own voice of Truth and are direct and literal.

As far as ritual and pageantry there is nothing that quite compares to the transfixing magic of an Ayahuasca ceremony. The music of Ayahuasca is the Icaros sung by the shaman himself. They are sometimes haunting, often beautiful melodies passed down from generation to generation, taught initially by the plants themselves they say. The shaman works with rattles made of leaves, tobacco, cinnamon, rose water, and pours his energy into the ceremony, carrying you to the realms beyond death, partly by the sweat of his labor. His physical manipulations throughout the ceremony have a direct and dramatic effect. You feel indelibly part of something mystical.

The iboga ceremony is simpler, quieter, longer. The Bwiti music played has an incredibly high BPM which is somehow soothing for the hyperactive mind. It is almost like having music at such a hectic pace helps the mind to think more slowly… Or at least it entertains the manic, fidgety side of our brain. The shaman’s interaction is more verbal, talking to you during the ceremony in a straight forward and non mystical manner. However, at the beginning of my ceremony, Moughenda, a 10th generation Bwiti shaman, tapped something in the center of my forehead (third eye) that made a tangible impact. It sounded like two nuts slamming together, but whatever it was helped send my mind on the journey of its life. Also prior to the ceremony we had what was called a spiritual shower at the river,that had more heartfelt intent than many of the ceremonies of the Laika shamans in the sacred valley of Peru.

Million Dollar Question: If I have to choose, which should I do?

First of all, I think the question should be, which should I do FIRST? Because if you are going to make the commitment to explore the depths of your mind, soul, and the infinite universe, both of these medicines are the best things you can do for yourself. But time and money are obstacles, and I realize that it may be several years before you can save up enough of both to complete even one of these journeys. So here are some practical guidelines.

1. Do you have an addiction problem, eating disorder, or self-limiting mental issue? If the answer is Yes, then Iboga for sure.
2. Would you prefer to know the answers to your questions, or feel & see the answers to your questions? To know, choose Iboga—To feel and see choose Ayahuasca.
3. Do you want an experience unlike anything you can find in the physical plane. Something wholly other? Choose Ayahuasca.
4. Do you want to make peace/communicate with deceased family members/friends? Choose Iboga.
5. Is your mind the root of your physical illness or your body? For mind, choose Iboga, for body choose Ayahuasca (except in the case of physical drug dependency, for which Iboga is an expert)

Where do I go to experience these medicines?

Unfortunately these powerful healing tools are banned in our country. I have had to seek them well south of our border. While I know there are many very good shamans in the world, I can only recommend the ones that I have been to. But please do your own research and if you find anywhere else that is great, let me know and I will include the links! In the meantime here are the references to where I have gone.

Ayahuasca – Maestro Orlando Chujandama

IbogaHouse – Moughenda

Feel free to ask any more questions, as the comments section of this blog can turn into something of an FAQ!

It was cave-black in the small earthen hut. The opening to the fresh cool air of the jungle was sealed completely by a thick leather shield. A pile of molten stones was giving off immense heat from a small navel in the center of the ground. We had entered our 4th and final symbolic door, a full two hours from when we crawled into the igloo shaped sweat lodge. The heat alone was almost unbearable, and a full bucket of aromatic water that was about to be steam still remained un-spilled. I knew from the third stage that as soon as the water hit the stones I would be hit by a wave of heat like dragon breath. The last time with 6 fewer molten stones, I had gone prostrate to the ground, gasping for what little air I could find. This time I resolved that I would not falter, would not lay down in an act of submission, and my voice would not waiver, no matter how desperately I wanted to escape. This was the time to be a warrior. This was the purification of fear and doubt. The shaman splashed the water on the rocks, and the ancient chants of defiance and gratitude were raised to the beat of the drum…

The sweat lodge is a North American spiritual tradition that followed the path of the Native Americans from Canada to Central America. Often associated with the Peyote tradition, I would learn first hand that no plant medicine is necessary to have a profound, psychedelic-like experience. The power of the sweat lodge lies in both an intense purification through sweat and pungent herbal smoke, and the creation of what truly feels like a near-death experience. In every good sweat lodge comes a point where your body will tell you that you cannot handle any more heat or you will die. In pushing through that point, you conquer your fears of death and have a deep appreciation for life.

While the traditions and ritualism surrounding the Temazcal varies dramatically the idea is usually the same. You give your voice, your sweat, and your intentions to the Earth and your fellow creatures on the planet in a humbling sacrifice. In return, you are purified, cleansed, rejuvenated and the doors of perception wiped clean.

Unlike many of the other medicines of Shamanism the sweat lodge is an active medicine. You do not have time for deep introspection like you would in an isolation tank. You are in a battle, and you keep your mind occupied by remembering what you are fighting for.

For myself, the moment that “fourth door” signifying the end of the Temazcal was opened, and I lay on my back looking up at the jungle canopy above, breathing the cool misty air, I had an appreciation for nature and the simple act of being alive in a potency that no medicine had ever given me. Only Ayahuasca had a similar effect, but whereas the Ayahuasca aftermath was long-lasting and mild, this was acute and incredibly powerful.

I recommend the Temazcal for everyone to experience. But be prepared to go to war with your fear and your weakness. If you are claustrophobic or hypochondriacally inclined be ready for the fight of your life. And when its over, look around you at the stars, the earth, the sun, the sand, the plants, the animals your fellow humans… And remember why life is worth fighting for.