A Story of Salvation​

My name is John.

And this is a book about salvation.

It’s about getting there. And staying there.

Another term for salvation is unconditional love. It is a spiritual state and the ultimate goal of Christianity. Unconditional love is what Jesus taught. Reaching this level of consciousness guarantees the salvation of the soul.

I am going to assume you have already read the Book of Answers and are already familiar with terms such as level of consciousness (LOC), muscle testing, and the different levels on the Map of Consciousness. I won’t explain them again here. So if you haven’t read it yet, please do so now.

While the main purpose of Answers was to inform you about the major breakthroughs that have been recently made in the religious/spiritual realm, the purpose of this book is to make it all real.

And one of the best ways to make something real is to tell a story.

But, rest assured, the tale you are about to read is absolutely true.

It is the story of one man’s incredible journey to salvation.

And it is a story that just happens to be my own.

Now, you are probably wondering why I would be worthy of having a book that stands side by side with those of the Apostles and the other great saints of Christianity.

Well, I certainly don’t claim to be on the same level as those men. But I do believe I have something of immense value to offer. For one thing, I’m pretty sure you’ve never read a story quite like this one. It perfectly illustrates the new accelerated path to salvation/unconditional love that is now available to all.

Just as Jesus used parables (i.e. stories) to teach his principles, my story will do a much better job helping you comprehend things like Radical Truth and Iboga than any textbook explanation possibly could. It will also give you a much better understanding of the struggles, the pitfalls, and the rewards that lie ahead.

I should probably begin by saying that I am currently 48 years old as I write these words. But my journey on this path began more than three decades earlier. It all started when I was 16 and a junior in high school.

It was May 1990, and I was watching a film in a movie theater. I’m not going to mention the name of the film as it would probably come across as ridiculous.

There was a small moment in this movie that struck me in a very profound way, and as a result, I made a decision. Previously, I had always been a loner. I had always actively avoided other people. I actually wanted to be alone.

But after watching this one seemingly insignificant scene, that changed.

I no longer wanted to be a loner. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had made the decision to pursue love. I wanted love, although I never thought of it in that way. My path to unconditional love had begun.

It has always struck me as amazing that all this began because of a silly popcorn movie. But it just goes to show how sometimes the smallest things can change the direction of our lives in very profound ways.

Ironically, I was raised as a Christian (I grew up in New Jersey), yet this upbringing did not put me on the path to unconditional love even though this is what Jesus taught. As I recall, my church seemed to put more emphasis on Jesus himself than on his actual teachings. Those teachings were certainly never explained to me in the way they are explained here. Not once during all those years did I ever realize that Jesus actually taught unconditional love. I find that to be pretty stunning.

Sadly, I never really cared much for church or Sunday school. I just never found either of them to be all that interesting, and after high school, I stopped attending church regularly even though I remained a Christian.

So how did my pursuit of love initially go? Unfortunately, not well. At all. When I moved away from home and attended college, I was hopeful that I would be able to make lots of friends. I thought that if I could only find a group of friends, there would be little else I would ever need in life. Unfortunately, I wound up falling woefully short in this regard. During my four years of college, I didn’t make many friends, and it was extremely frustrating and disappointing.

I believe part of the problem was that when you pursue love, all the obstacles to love come up. You often experience these obstacles in the form of people being cruel to you. You have to work through them, and this can be a very long and difficult process, one that could take years or even decades.

But another part of the problem was that I had serious issues, to put it charitably. I hated myself, and when you hate yourself you tend to attract hatred from other people as well. I also had terrible fears that I couldn’t control. Fears of uncertainty and rejection. This made me a terribly shy person with a personality that didn’t exactly attract people. I also had another serious limitation that made people dislike me, one that I will reveal later.

When I graduated college, I was sadly ill-prepared for the real world. I didn’t do well. I would easily feel overwhelmed which meant I had a terrible time doing anything difficult, and I struggled in every aspect of my life, making so many mistakes that it’s hard to fathom.

Perhaps the lowest point of my life came two years after I graduated. I tried to start a business only to have it fail in the most spectacular way possible after a partner betrayed me. I lost all my money, and then soon after I experienced the worst day of my entire life when I got fired from my job. This happened because I made terrible mistakes in my work. How terrible, you ask? Well, if these mistakes hadn’t been caught in time, the entire company could have gone out of business. They were that bad. I could never understand how I could have been so careless, and the incident would forever haunt me. For the next few months, I drifted aimlessly from temp job to temp job with no idea what to do next. Soon, I found myself falling into a deep despair.

By some fluke, I was driving to another temp job when I heard a radio commercial announcing a four-day “self-help” seminar taking place later in the week. I was already familiar with the organization running it as I had purchased one of their audio tape systems a few years earlier. Amazingly, the seminar was within close driving distance of my house.

The cost of the seminar was $700 which I could barely afford. But it just felt like fate that this opportunity had arrived at my doorstep. I couldn’t say no.

This decision would wind up transforming my entire life, although not in a way that I would have expected.

The seminar itself was an incredible experience. I did a number of things including a fire walk where I walked barefoot across hot coals. When it was over, I felt like I had been given an incredible boost and another chance at life.

But this feeling would turn out to be temporary. It didn’t last long. What really made the biggest difference for me came a few years after the seminar. I became more closely affiliated with this organization and bought more of its programs. And one of them suggested adopting a code of conduct: To treat all people with kindness at all times, no matter what.

This is an important spiritual benchmark, one that is vital for anyone on the path to unconditional love. Now, I can’t say that I have always been kind to every single person 100% of the time, but I’ve adhered to this code of conduct fairly well.

The other important thing that happened was that I was eventually convinced to buy into a coaching program that the organization offered. I hired a success coach for a six-month period. We would talk on the phone once a week, and he would help me focus on achieving my goals. This would also transform my life, but again not in the way I had envisioned.

At one point this coach recommended a book to me. It was called Power Vs. Force by Dr. David Hawkins. In this book, I would for the first time learn about muscle testing, the levels of consciousness, and get a concrete picture of the spiritual journey. I eventually would read all of Hawkins’s other books as well. This was another major milestone in regard to the path I was on.

In 2001, I attended a large seminar in Palm Springs, CA. There were around 3000 attendees. At one point, I remember a woman in the crowd taking the microphone. She was a Christian, and her issue was that she was terrified she was going to burn in hell.

The man running the seminar tackled her problem in a fascinating way. He didn’t simply say, “No, you won’t.” Other people had surely tried that already. Instead, he asked her a question: “Does God grow?”

He then said that God in the Old Testament is angry and vengeful, but in the New Testament, God becomes loving and merciful. So he made the case that God has grown and evolved over time. This approach worked as the woman looked relieved and no longer seemed to be afraid of God.

But this left an impression on me. For the first time, I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with Christianity. If there were Christians who were terrified of God, terrified of burning in hell, then something certainly wasn’t right.

Over the years I would go to other seminars including a really expensive one that took place in the Bahamas. I enjoyed going to seminars. I would always seem to have a good time. But unfortunately, I was never able to make the changes I truly wanted to make. I wasn’t able to get over my fear which made it almost impossible to ask a woman out, and I kept making terrible decisions in pretty much every aspect of my life. I tried numerous times to start a business, but nothing ever worked out. I remember at one point looking back at my years since graduating from college and realizing that virtually every decision I had made had been the wrong one.

“I always make the wrong decision,” I remember saying to myself. I couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible.

In 2009, I attended a lecture by David Hawkins in Arizona. This was actually a good decision. Hawkins was enlightened and his level of consciousness was at 980. I met him and got to shake his hand. When you physically touch an enlightened person, their spiritual aura is transferred to you, and this brings tremendous karmic benefits.

I wish I could say that I felt something amazing happen when I shook his hand, but I didn’t. Regardless, I suspect having his aura inside me had something to do with the good spiritual fortune I would experience years later. It was no doubt another important step on my path to unconditional love.

But my life didn’t get better immediately after meeting Hawkins. I still struggled. For the next couple of years, my life didn’t go particularly well.

It was pretty frustrating. It felt like I had gone to all the seminars and read all the self-help books. It felt like I had tried everything, but I still couldn’t seem to do anything right. In the eyes of the world, I was a loser.

It honestly felt like I was cursed, and I simply had no idea what else to do or try. When I turned 40 in 2013, I was single and alone. I had pretty much given up.

But my life wasn’t over. Little did I know it at the time, but when I turned 41 my spiritual journey would kick into high gear.
And nothing would ever be the same.

***

One of the most important things I learned from David Hawkins was the Letting Go method. Whenever we feel pain, our automatic instinct is to resist the pain, to try to push it away. But a better way is the path of non-resistance. Instead, don’t resist the pain. Say yes to it. Ask for more of it. With non-resistance, we can often run the pain out and heal ourselves quickly.

Here is an interesting example. One winter day in 2009 I was walking on an icy driveway. I slipped and fell backward, landing flat on my back. The pain was excruciating. It felt like I had broken my back, although I hadn’t. Remembering the Letting go method, I didn’t resist the pain and kept thinking, More! More! Two minutes later, the pain was gone. I stood up, and I wasn’t even bruised or sore!

As impressive as this was, I would eventually learn that this tool can be used in much more powerful ways.

In December 2014, only a few months after I had turned 41, I suddenly found myself thinking about something from my past. This was something that went back to when I was 16 and a junior in high school.

At the time, I made a mistake that I deeply regretted. There was a beautiful girl whom I had a chance to be with, but I let her slip through my fingers. You may have a hard time understanding why 25 years later this would still be an issue for me. But it was. For this was a mistake that had caused me a great deal of pain and anguish.

And now I suddenly found myself thinking about it a lot, although I wasn’t sure why. But then I remembered what I had learned from David Hawkins, that many people have a lot of suppressed unconscious guilt. I wondered if maybe I might have some unconscious guilt regarding what had happened. On January 2, I decided to try to tap into it to see if anything might come up.

And something did.

Something deep inside me suddenly erupted. With a vengeance.

It was guilt. It was grief. All of it suppressed for decades, and now it was coming up. I knew that trying to suppress it would be a mistake, so I used the Letting Go method. I didn’t resist it. I let it come up and allowed myself to fully experience it so I could release it. But it just kept coming. And coming. And coming.

For over two days, this continued. It wasn’t fun. The guilt and grief just kept coming up. I had no idea when it would end. But I was also in turmoil over what I had now realized, that I had never gotten over what had happened.

It was around 2 am on January 4. I was lying in bed, struggling to grapple with this issue that I suddenly could no longer ignore. But I had no idea what to do. I had no idea how to deal with the mistake I had made so many years ago. Desperately searching for an answer, I eventually made a decision. I decided to make a vow:

I’m going to love more.

At that precise moment, something happened.

An enormous jolt of energy surged through my entire body.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I didn’t need to.

My entire body was vibrating with energy. It was the most incredible feeling I had ever experienced up to that point. I was staring at my hands, and grinning from ear to ear. I was just swelling with joy. There may be no words to describe just how amazing I felt.

I realized that I had just jumped to a higher level of consciousness, although I didn’t know exactly how high. But it felt like a lot. The experience itself was in the 500s (Love), and I actually thought I had reached the 500s. Later I would learn that I had merely reached the 200s. But this is still an important threshold, as the 200s are the beginning of integrity.

So a journey that had started almost 25 years earlier had finally begun to bear fruit. And I was feeling sky high.

In the immediate days afterward, I never felt lethargic or tired. At all. I had an endless amount of energy available, and I assumed that this would be a permanent condition.

Alas, it would not. Both the energy and the incredible joy I was feeling soon dialed back.

But that wasn’t the worst part. After what I had just experienced, I thought my fears would be gone. But it was only a week or so until I realized that this wasn’t the case.

Became of this, I started to feel depressed. It was just so frustrating. I couldn’t believe the fear was still there. I didn’t know what to do. What would it take to get rid of it?

I started rereading the David Hawkins book Letting Go. There was a short passage in the book about releasing fear, but it was vague and didn’t offer anything specific. Still frustrated, I kept asking, “What is the answer? What is the answer?”

In desperation, I sent a message to a David Hawkins email group that I was a part of. I mentioned the passage in the book and asked how one could use the Letting Go method to release fear.

I initially received a number of replies, but none of them were really serious. A week later, however, I received a message from a woman named Elsa who was in her late 30s. She said she facilitated a method called Radical Truth and offered to do a free session with me over the phone.

I was skeptical, but I had nothing to lose, so I said yes.

On January 13 we did our session, and what happened over the course of the hour turned out to be pretty stunning, to say the least. With the use of muscle testing (the O-ring method described in Answers), Elsa discovered something that was done to me at age 2. Something terrible.

I won’t say what it was. But it’s the kind of thing that turns your entire world upside down. After learning what had been done to me, my lifelong struggles with relationships suddenly began to make a lot more sense.

Elsa was also able to identify an unconscious block that was related to what had happened. This block was at Below Zero on the Map of Consciousness. This is the lowest of the low, the equivalent of wanting to die. I then was able to use the Letting Go method to release it. I felt pretty drained afterward. Elsa said my voice sounded different. It definitely felt like I had released something enormous.

This would be confirmed two days later when something extraordinary occurred. My body suddenly began to heat up. I could feel it getting warmer and warmer and soon my entire body was practically burning up. Imagine having a 102-degree fever but not feeling sick, and you will have an idea of what this was like. But there was more.

My hands and face became bright red. Both my hands and feet had a prickly feeling. It was just so bizarre. It felt like something supernatural was happening to me, but I had no idea what it was. I actually felt a little scared.

Was I burning up inside? Was I dying?

I started drinking water, and my body began to cool down. Soon I was fine and back to normal.

When I told Elsa about this, she did some testing and discovered what had happened. As it turns out, the chakra related to my solar plexus had opened up. In the process, it released an enormous amount of energy, and this was what caused the side effects I experienced.

As you might guess, I was sold on Radical Truth. I realized that God had thrown me a lifeline, and I decided to grab it and hold on with everything I had.

Elsa had been learning to do Radical Truth over the past year. She did a few more sessions with me for free, but then she decided to officially open her practice and so she started charging me. Her rates weren’t cheap, but it didn’t matter. I honestly didn’t care what it cost. I was all in on Radical Truth.

Looking back, not having a family to support was actually a blessing as far as pursuing my spiritual goals. If I had had a wife and children who were dependent on me, it would have been very hard to justify the amount of money I spent.

I also decided to keep notes on most of my Radical Truth sessions. In retrospect, I am so glad that I did. When it came to writing this book, those notes would prove to be invaluable.

The best way I can describe Radical Truth would be to say that if the traditional spiritual path is the equivalent of going 5 miles per hour, then Radical Truth is the equivalent of going 55 miles per hour.

It is like a roller coaster ride with incredible highs and equally incredible lows. One moment you are feeling sky high, higher than you have ever been, and the next moment a painful block comes up that sends you crashing back down to Earth. It wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t always fun. But there was simply no turning back for me now.

I decided to do two sessions a week with Elsa. At the time, I naively believed that it would only take about three months to remove all my fears and become an essentially perfect human being. Alas, this did not happen.

The challenge is that any issue you are trying to resolve usually has multiple layers to it. It is like peeling off the layers of an onion. And you can only work on one layer at a time. For the rest, you have to wait until they are available. You simply can’t release all the layers at once.

An example would be an issue that Elsa and I worked on regarding wanting to live. For most people, the statement “I want to live” tests false. It was the same for me as well. This doesn’t mean you are suicidal; it just means that you unconsciously don’t want to be here.

Elsa and I spent several weeks working on this. At the end of the first session, when I said “I want to live” it was around 15% true. After the next session, it was 35% true. This percentage slowly kept going up over the next three sessions until it was finally 100% true. When I finally got there, it felt like a tremendous accomplishment.

However, a month later, we again tested the statement “I want to live,” and this time it tested false. What had happened was that there were more layers to the issue that had come up.

If you want to know why it is so hard to change yourself, there you have it. Every issue we have has many layers to it, and there is rarely a quick fix for any of them. There is just so much darkness that exists inside each of us, so much negative junk. Removing it all is incredibly difficult.

It may sound disheartening to hear this. But the good news is that with Radical Truth it wasn’t long before things started really moving for me.

On May 25, only four months after I started, a block came up during a session that was the largest we had ever tackled. It had to do with my mom. When I was a baby, she didn’t fully love me. It probably wasn’t intentional, but she held back love for some personal reason. Elsa said that babies who aren’t fully loved by their mothers can have serious issues later in life. After I released the block, I felt pretty drained.

About an hour afterward, I received an email from Elsa. She wrote only a single line: “You’ve transcended the 200s!”

I was too tired to jump up and down and celebrate, but the significance of what had happened hadn’t escaped me. In the span of just four months, I had risen from 190 to the 300s. Keep in mind that the average person only moves up 5 points in a single lifetime. (Hawkins, 2001, p. 169) Yet I had gone up over a hundred points in just a couple of months. It truly was amazing.

And the 300s are actually a pretty good place to be. Many successful business people are at this level.

There were so many incredible things that happened during my work with Elsa.

When I turned 40, I started to have a recurring pain in my upper leg that sometimes made it difficult to walk. It had appeared for no particular reason, and I asked Elsa to look into it. She tested that when I was very young I had adopted a belief from one of my parents. They told me that when you get old, you start to have all kinds of problems. I believed it, and so when I hit 40 I started creating that reality for myself. With Elsa’s help, I was able to let go of the belief. As a result, the pain immediately stopped and never returned.

Our beliefs really do shape our reality. At one point I suffered a neck injury. It wasn’t too bad until I went to sleep at night. When I would wake up the next morning, my neck would be in excruciating pain, and this prevented the injury from getting better.

When I told Elsa that the added pressure on my neck from sleeping was exacerbating my injury, she said, “That’s a belief.” She suggested that I simply change my belief about the situation.

And so I did. I decided that I would no longer believe that sleeping on my neck had any effect on my injury. After making this change, guess what happened? I woke up the next day, and my neck felt fine. Amazing. So much of what we experience really does come down to our beliefs.

A couple of months later, Elsa did some testing about the girl in high school. She discovered that I had known her in two previous lifetimes and that we were married in one of them. At least now I knew why I took it so hard when she slipped through my fingers. Elsa also tested that there was negative karma between the two of us.

Whenever someone does something bad to you, it is best to assume that there is negative karma between the two of you which may have carried over from a previous lifetime. You simply forgive them for anything and everything they have done to you while also forgiving yourself for whatever you may have done to them. That is all it takes to undo the negative karma. Hopefully, you then won’t have to do the same dance with this person again in another lifetime.

It's been said that if you kill someone, then it is likely that in a previous lifetime they killed you. This will usually continue on and on until someone finally breaks the cycle. Now you know how.

I did this exercise, and Elsa told me that the negative karma between the two of us was finally gone.

Thanks to Elsa, there were more things I discovered about myself, including that I’ve had around 50 previous lifetimes. I learned about many of them, and it seems that most of them didn’t go particularly well.

My previous human lifetime was in the 1800s in which I was a woman. When I was 15, I had sex out of wedlock and became damaged goods. As a result, I was forced to marry below my station. Later in that lifetime, I accidentally killed my ten-year-old child in a fit of rage.

I've been gay. I've been a stunningly beautiful (but evil) woman. I've been a robber. I've been a prostitute. I've committed suicide as a member of a cult. I've even committed murder.

Do I feel bad about some of these terrible things I’ve done? Not really, simply because I can’t remember any of them. And I’m very grateful for that. The regrets of a single lifetime have been hard enough to deal with.

When it came up that I had been a robber in a past lifetime, we tackled it in an interesting way. By completely owning what I did and then forgiving myself, I was able to remove the negative karma that I still had.

Think about what this means. We now have the ability to undo negative karma without having to suffer the negative consequences of that karma.

This changes everything.

In the end, I’ve found it really helpful to know about my previous lifetimes as it has given me a sense of perspective. When you have had 50 lifetimes that pretty much all went bad, what’s one more? At least in this one, I’ve made real progress.

Elsa also told me that I entered this particular lifetime very reluctantly. When I was born, there was an energy field of fear. Fear of God. Fear of retaliation. There was also a valence of pride. I saw myself as God’s puppet. I was willing to go through the motions and go through my karma, but I didn’t want to really live. I didn’t want to have to try. I decided I would go through this lifetime grudgingly which, sadly, I have.

Around September 2015, I started to practice muscle testing using the same O-ring method that Elsa used. I had tried muscle testing many times in the past, but I was never any good at it (which makes sense given that my LOC was below 200 which automatically disqualifies you from being able to use the test). But I knew it would be an invaluable tool to have. If Elsa ever went away, I wanted to be able to continue doing Radical Truth on my own.

Initially, I put pictures of positive and negative images into different envelopes. For example, I might have a picture of George Washington in one envelope and a picture of Adolf Hitler in another. I tried to test if the image in the envelope was above 200 or not, but I had little success. Part of the problem with this approach was that there was a 50/50 chance of getting it right, so if I got a correct result it was hard to tell if I was getting it right because I was accurate or if it was simply because I was lucky. But my results were never consistently correct, so I had to conclude that I was just lucky whenever I got it right.

Fortunately, I soon found a better approach. I would practice muscle testing by doing Radical Truth. I would test for blocks and then use the Letting Go method to release them. With Radical Truth, you don’t actually have to be 100% accurate. You just have to get the gist of it right. And I had Elsa to check my results. Early on, I remember times when my testing was only 30% accurate, and yet it was still enough to release the available block.

For almost two years, I practiced muscle testing every single day almost without fail. And slowly but surely, I became more accurate and more confident. And I would use this new ability to do some pretty amazing things.

One morning I was taking a shower, and I suddenly had an almost horrific pain in my back. It suddenly appeared for no apparent reason, and I was in absolute agony. I couldn’t sit down. I could barely move. Thankfully, with muscle testing, I was able to determine what the block was that was related to the pain and release it. Within a half hour, the pain was gone.

I can only imagine what might have happened if I hadn’t been able to utilize Radical Truth. I wouldn’t have been able to go to work, so I might have lost my job. I also might have felt compelled to take drugs for the pain, a scary thought given how many people get addicted to painkillers these days. I really think I dodged a bullet.

There actually isn’t a set way to do Radical Truth. In fact, the way that Elsa practiced it evolved over time. When I first started working with her, you would release a block by experiencing the emotion of the block to the fullest. If the block was Guilt, you would actually make yourself experience the full feeling of guilt which wasn’t particularly fun. After it was over, you would often feel drained.

About a year later, Elsa discovered a gentler way of releasing blocks. With this new approach, you would visualize the negative emotion as a dark cloud above you that filled the entire sky. Whatever the emotion was, you would allow yourself to feel it only a little bit. By visualizing it as a cloud and just looking at it without resistance or judgment, this went a long way toward releasing it. At the end of the process, you would “invite love into it.”

You would imagine a whirlwind of love coming in and filling up the entire sky until the dark cloud was gone. Then you would imagine this love - God’s love - coming down and filling you up as well, completely encompassing your entire body and spirit. You would allow yourself to feel God’s love and allow it to heal you.

This made a huge difference. Not only was it easier, but it also released the block faster.

I believe it was around December 2015 that another one of my chakras opened up. It felt the same as it did previously. My entire body rapidly heated up, my face and hands turned right red, and there was a prickly feeling in my hands and feet. Elsa tested that it was my heart chakra that had opened this time. No doubt about it. I was making amazing progress.

In early January 2016, I felt a shift occur. I can’t really describe it, but it felt like my level of consciousness had increased. I checked with Elsa, and she confirmed that I had reached the 400s.

The 400s are the level of Reason. This is where the intellect shines. The very best scientists, teachers, university professors, and statesmen are at this level. Elsa told me that I might find myself being more analytical in how I viewed everything. (Hawkins, 1995, pp. 98-99)

I felt pretty excited as I was getting closer to the 500s (Love). In the book Power vs. Force, David Hawkins provides an amazing description of what the 500s are like, and I really wanted to experience it firsthand. As the months went by, however, I started to feel frustrated by my seeming lack of progress.

On May 30, I had a session with Elsa that was really gut-wrenching. Elsa discovered a “stack” that was preventing me from reaching 500. After releasing the first block, Elsa discovered another block lying “underneath” it. After releasing the second block, Elsa found yet another block that was underneath that one. This continued on for about five or six blocks. Releasing them all was, for some reason, just a grueling process. It was a long, deep black hole, and one of the toughest Radical Truth sessions I’ve ever done.

And when it was finally all over I still hadn’t reached 500! It was now getting beyond frustrating.

But then something happened on July 14. During another session, Elsa discovered there was an energy field of “trying to get to the 500s.” She helped me to release this energy field, and then she did an interesting exercise where she had me visualize an energy field that was at the level of Love. Elsa slowly guided me into it, and all of a sudden I was in the 500s! I have no idea how she knew that would work, but it did!

How to describe being in the 500s? There is this feeling of love that encompasses your entire body that is just really amazing. However, as wonderful as this state is, being at this level doesn’t mean that your life is perfect. You can still feel pain. You can still get caught up in negativity and other painful emotions. But without question, you are now vibrating on a completely different level. I really wish everyone could experience the 500s, even just for a moment. If they did, I’m sure they would never be willing to settle for anything less.

The very next day, I found myself coming down with a sore throat, and I knew exactly what was happening: spiritual pride. This feeling of specialness happens to everyone who reaches the higher levels, and it is a grave danger. I used the Letting Go method to release the pride, and the sore throat went away for the time being. But I was constantly fighting back a sore throat for the next two weeks.

I was still practicing muscle testing, and it was around this time that I tried to use it to detect planned terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck. When I talked to Elsa about this, she said my intention was to create a new era for mankind. However, this intention calibrated at only 120. She said a better reason, one that had integrity, would be to promote truth.

Another problem with trying to do something like this is that it requires 100% accuracy, a very difficult thing to pull off. It’s likely impossible for anyone to always be 100% accurate. Also, you cannot test the future. So even if you discover a planned attack, there is always the possibility that it could be delayed or canceled. If this happens, it may appear you got it wrong even if you didn’t. Eventually, I wound up letting the idea go. But I do believe that using muscle testing to detect planned terrorist attacks is something that governments should absolutely try to do.

Despite reaching the 500s, an old issue kept gnawing at me. I was still feeling deep regret over the big mistake I made back in high school. Fortunately, Elsa was able to help me with this. She said that what happened was karmic. As painful as it was, it was necessary for me to undo negative karma, and that is the ultimate purpose of this lifetime. So I’ve actually been on the perfect path.

My whole life has been perfect.

This new perspective really helped me. A lot. And I hope it will help others as well.

Did this finally put an end to all my pain and regret about what happened? No, but it did make it easier to bear.

Not too long after, Elsa discovered that there was an unconscious desire to replace God. I had a program that I’d been carrying for many lifetimes.

The program: I am God.

I thought I deserved to be God because of all the suffering I had endured. Sometimes, Elsa would take a program and “turn it around.” By doing this, you often get a higher truth.

With this particular program, the turnaround was: God is me.

Both phrases appear to be saying the same thing, but “I am God” tests false. Why? It is because “I am God” is more ego-centric.

When you do this work, you discover that it is very common for people to have issues regarding God. You would think that only atheists would have these issues. But as you can see, religious people have them as well.

One day at my job something interesting happened. I started to feel agony, and I suddenly found myself hating my job, desperately wanting to quit. I had fallen into a pit of deep despair.

However, one thing I’ve learned from this work is that you are never in pain for the reason you think you are. The reason is always something unconscious. So during my break, I did some muscle testing and discovered that my pain was not because of my job but because of an issue with a family member. After releasing the block, the pain disappeared, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the day.

During another session, Elsa and I were talking about the progress I had been making as far as learning how to muscle test. I told her about some of the plans I had for muscle testing. But then Elsa surprised me by issuing a challenge of sorts. She asked me if I was willing to serve God. To be a servant of God.

A moment passed. And then I answered yes.

At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what this would mean. But I do now. If you are reading this book, it should be very clear.

On November 28, Elsa said that I was close to reaching 540. Exactly one month later, on December 28, I woke up that morning feeling just awful. The two previous days had been bad, but this was even worse. My teeth were in agony because I gritted them hard during my sleep. I felt bad enough that I tried to call out of work, but I was told I would have to go in.

Using the Letting Go method, I was able to release whatever painful block had surfaced, and apparently, it worked because I went on to have a great day. When it was all over, I felt very different. I could tell that something profound had just occurred.

I emailed Elsa and asked her if my suspicions were correct. I asked her if I had reached 540, the level of unconditional love. She emailed me back and said yes!

I had finally done it. I had reached what for me felt like the pinnacle. Unconditional Love. Salvation. The level that would guarantee the salvation of my soul. I had gone from 190 to 540 in a span of just two years.

So mission accomplished. Game over. The End. Right?

Well, actually no. As it turned out, this was not the end of my accelerated spiritual journey. It was not even the beginning of the end. It was merely the end of the beginning.

I could never have imagined it at the time, but the craziest, most insane part of my journey still lay ahead.

At that time, though, I honestly did believe it was the beginning of the end. I had jumped over 300 points in just two years. At this pace, I believed I could reasonably expect to reach 600 sometime in the next year.

600 (Peace) is the first level of enlightenment. Half the people who reach 600 leave the body. (Hawkins, 2003, p. 152) Therefore, it seemed very possible that I wouldn’t be around much longer. So just a few weeks later, in January 2017, I took an impromptu vacation and went to Walt Disney World and Universal Studios in Florida. I saw this trip as possibly being my last hurrah.

I went to Universal Studios first. Unfortunately, I wasn’t having as much fun as I’d hoped because walking around the park was causing my legs to be in a great deal of pain.

It didn’t make sense. I was in okay physical shape, so I couldn’t understand how this could be happening. By the second day, the pain was so bad that it was on the verge of ruining my entire vacation.

I called Elsa for help. She discovered a limiting belief: I’m weak.

I let go of the belief, and the pain quickly disappeared. Elsa had saved me again.

There was a movie theater at the Universal CityWalk, and I decided to see the Disney animated film Moana which was playing. It was really great. My favorite part of the movie is when the heroine sings the song “How Far I’ll Go.” This is the “I want” song that appears in every Disney animated musical. It is the song where the protagonist sings about their desires, hopes, and dreams.

I was really inspired by the song and its lyrics which say that no one knows how far the horizon goes. It made me think that maybe my life wasn’t almost over after all. Even though I was at 540, even though it felt like I had reached the top of the mountain, maybe there was a lot farther I could go, and not just in terms of my level of consciousness. Maybe I could use my ability to muscle test to help other people.
Maybe, just maybe, some truly amazing things were still ahead.
Some more time passed. On March 29, I thought I hit 600. It certainly felt like a big shift had occurred. I had Elsa check, and she tested that this was true. However, she then went to her mentor, Manfred Luck, and had him test me. He got that I was at 540.

What apparently occurred was that I had temporarily experienced a higher state of consciousness, but my level of consciousness hadn’t actually gone up. This is something that can happen.

When Elsa told me that I wasn’t enlightened, I was actually okay with it. I just didn’t feel like there was any big rush to reach enlightenment. And when you get to the 600s and higher, life can be really chaotic (assuming you don’t leave the body). The 800s are said to be horrifically painful. The Buddha wrote about the incredible agony he suffered at this level (Hawkins, 2003, p. 149), and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to that. So I was perfectly content to be at 540, at least for the time being. And I realize now that if you don’t want to go higher, you won’t.

Anyway, I had become good enough at muscle testing (I was around 90 percent accurate) that I felt I was ready to start what would be an amazing new chapter in my life. I would start facilitating Radical Truth for other people and would charge 85 dollars an hour. I referred to myself as a spiritual coach, although I was essentially a therapist. But I considered Radical Truth to be better than any therapy out there.

Why? Because as I’ve said, you are never in pain for the reason you think you are. So with a traditional therapist, you can spend weeks, months, or even years trying to resolve an issue that has nothing to do with why you are in pain. This process just doesn’t compare with Radical Truth which can quickly identify and resolve the issue much faster, sometimes in mere minutes.

On June 27 I did my first Radical Truth session. It went pretty well, and I was impressed with my level of confidence. Given my history, being able to stay calm and cool in a pressure situation was no small thing.

I would get most of my clients through either Facebook or referrals. I was a member of several David Hawkins spirituality groups on Facebook, and I would target people in these groups because they were already familiar with the concept of muscle testing. When someone wrote a post about an issue they were dealing with, I often would privately message them and offer a free session through a video call. Many were surprisingly open to it, even though they had never heard of Radical Truth and didn’t know exactly what they were getting into.

I’ll never forget a session that I did with a man whom I will refer to as Steve. After our initial introduction, I told him that I found a block from a certain age. However, Steve told me he was actually a year younger than the age I had stated. I laughed it off, saying that sometimes I can be off a little bit. I then proceeded to test the energy level of the block that was available.

“Guilt,” I told him.

Something inside Steve suddenly erupted. He started to break down, but I could tell he was trying to hold it in since he didn’t yet know me.
“Let it come up,” I said softly.

And so he did. He started crying, and the tears didn’t stop. The session was supposed to be an hour, but I wound up spending two hours with him since it was clear that he really needed help.

Afterward, I didn’t have to convince Steve to do another session. He was sold! Not only that, he started raving about me to other people, and I quickly had two more paying clients besides him.

As it turned out, my introducing Steve to Radical Truth would ultimately send him down a pretty amazing path. Not only did I have a tremendous impact on his life, but, as you will see, he would wind up having a tremendous impact on mine. It really is true that every ripple we send out ultimately comes back to us.
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One thing I quickly learned about the coaching business is that, in order to succeed, you need to be able to blow people away. Fortunately, I was often able to do this. Not only was I making good money, but I had finally become really good at something that I absolutely loved to do.
I eventually would work with people from all over the world. And it was all possible thanks to the internet and free video calling. I worked with people in England, Poland, Australia, Israel, and even South Africa.

Before starting a session, I would test the client’s energy field to see if it was reversed. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to read them. So I would have them do an exercise to correct this called the thymic thump. (Hawkins, 2001, Kindle p. 4743) It involves making a fist and then gently thumping the bottom of it on the sternum area of the chest several times. While doing this, you smile, think of someone you love, and repeatedly say, “Ha ha ha!” It's a bit strange, but it fixes your field.

One of my most memorable clients was a young woman from Australia. She had developed hives all over her face and was unable to get rid of them. She had been dealing with this for a year, and it was negatively affecting her health.

During our first session, it quickly became clear that she had an enormous amount of guilt. The truth is that all illness and disease are rooted in unconscious guilt. (Hawkins, 2009, p. 434) It is a way for us to punish ourselves. We mistakenly see ourselves as being afflicted by something “out there” when in reality we are our own worst enemy.

I told her all this and made it clear that she was doing this to herself. But the good news was that because she did it, this meant that she could undo it. But she had to own it and stop blaming other people. I could show her the path forward, but she had to take the actual steps.
My approach worked. She was willing, and I helped her to release the guilt she was carrying. After only the second session, the hives on her face almost magically disappeared.

Who says miracles never happen?

But Radical Truth wasn’t a cure-all. There was one woman who had severe chronic back pain whom I wasn’t able to help. I’m not completely sure why, but I got the impression that she wasn’t fully participating in the process. Offering a free initial session had its downsides. When people don’t pay anything, they aren’t always as motivated to do what you ask them to. Also, there could have been some karmic reason as to why she couldn’t be healed.

I should mention that I used prayer in this work. Before each session, there was a specific prayer I would use to ask for guidance and assistance:

I ask to be a servant of the Lord, a vehicle of Divine love, a channel of God’s will. I ask for direction and Divine assistance and surrender all personal will through devotion. I choose love and peace above all other options. I commit to the goal of unconditional love and compassion for all life, in all its expressions, and surrender all judgment to God.

I ask for help to get myself out of the way and focus entirely on my client. I ask God to help me deliver the truth in a way that is most beneficial and practice discernment with this task. The intention for each session is to pursue the “highest good.”

Whenever I would get stuck on something, such as trying to determine a negative program, I would pray to the Holy Spirit and ask to be given the answer. It sometimes took a while, but the answer would always inevitably come to me. It never ceased to amaze me when this happened. But I knew that I was essentially just a conduit. The answers were all provided by God.

Muscle testing would help with the process. For example, a negative program often begins with one of the following phrases: I can’t; I won’t; I’m not; I don’t; I want; God is; People are. So when trying to determine a program, I would test to see if any of these were the first two words of it. Once I knew what the first two words were, figuring out the rest was a lot easier.

My level of consciousness being in the 500s actually made me better at facilitating the whole process. When I told a client to imagine the block as a deep dark cloud and then invite love into it, I would do it with them. This would cause the block to release more quickly.

Another fascinating aspect of this work was that a good number of my clients were people I had known in a previous lifetime. Before I would do the first session with a new client, I would always test to see if there was any shared negative karma between us as this could negatively affect the sessions. If there was, I would then test to find the reason why. It wasn’t that uncommon for me to discover that I had been married to the person in a previous lifetime (This happened with four different clients). I would release the negative karma by simply forgiving myself for whatever I had done to them and forgiving them for whatever they had done to me.

I was also interested in doing consulting for businesses. I realized that with muscle testing you could test products to see if they had any flaws. You could also test business and marketing strategies to see if they were likely to succeed. But as you might guess, this was a pretty hard sell to make unless the person was already familiar with muscle testing.

Fortunately, I found such a person whom I will refer to as Nancy. She was a very successful business owner, and she needed help with a lawsuit she was fighting against a woman who was a former business partner. This person had sued her, and the lawsuit had dragged on for over a year. It had reached the point where Nancy was willing to settle on very generous terms. She just wanted to move on, but this woman refused to agree to any settlement no matter how favorable it was.

Nancy had tried just about everything, so now she was willing to try almost anything, even something as crazy as muscle testing. I got on the phone with her, and I was able to quickly discern the root of the problem.

Whenever someone is attacking you, you are often doing something that is contributing to the situation. You are likely doing something that is unconscious. You usually want something from the person that is attacking you. I tested that this was true with Nancy.

I asked Nancy what she wanted from her former partner. She quickly came up with an answer: Gratitude.

She wanted gratitude from this person because of everything she had done to help her. I tested that this was the problem.

When you want something from someone, even if it is unconscious and unsaid, they will often pick up on it and resist, sometimes in vicious ways. And this woman was resisting by way of this lawsuit.

It took some effort because it was so deeply ingrained, but eventually, I was able to help Nancy let go of wanting gratitude.

Two days later, her former partner agreed to settle the lawsuit.

I have to say that even I was surprised. It was hard to believe that the solution could have been so simple, so easy, and yet it was.

I firmly believe that many of our biggest problems have solutions that are as simple and as easy as the one above, yet because the root causes of these problems are unconscious, we’ve had no way of identifying the solutions.

Until now.

Hopefully, by this point, you can see that what muscle testing offers is not just a few steps forward; it has the capacity to transform our entire world.

Anyway, I had accumulated enough victories that I was certain I was headed for big things. Best of all, I felt I had finally found my true calling.
In July 2018, a little over a year after I had started my new career as a spiritual coach, I made the decision to quit my regular job. This would turn out to be a pretty bad move from a financial perspective. However, I don’t regret doing it because the free time I now had would turn out to be invaluable over the next year and a half.

Right after I quit my job, I suddenly lost several clients, and my coaching income dropped from $800 a week to around $200. And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.

But something else was happening. Elsa picked up that my energy field was becoming reversed on a fairly regular basis. Clearly, there was something about me that was off.

Elsa recommended that I start doing Radical Truth sessions with her mentor, Manfred Luck, as she thought that I could really benefit from working with him. I had been Elsa’s client for over three years. Even though I had heard that Manfred was really good (he was the one who created Radical Truth), I had stuck with Elsa. This was partly out of loyalty. She had simply done so much for me, and the two of us had become the dearest of friends. But it was mostly because I was very satisfied and never felt the need to try anyone else.

But Elsa now gave me her blessing to move on, and so I sent Manfred an email. He responded by saying that he was glad to hear from me and that he was looking forward to our first session.

Manfred was in his seventies and lived in Australia. His level of consciousness was in the 600s. He was a pretty charming guy, although he could be blunt and brutal at times. Elsa said Manfred was “the sword of truth.” And the truth is often very painful to hear.

As I would soon discover.

My first session with Manfred was on August 19. At the start of our video call, I thanked him for creating Radical Truth. He replied that he didn’t create it; he simply constructed it using things that were already out there (muscle testing, Letting Go, the Map of Consciousness). I got his point, but this always seemed to me to be a distinction without much of a difference. Yes, the building blocks for Radical Truth were created by other people, but Manfred put them all together in a way that was nothing less than genius.

It didn’t take long for Manfred to size me up. He said that I take myself too seriously. This was something I couldn’t disagree with. He said I needed to let go of attachments to specialness and self-importance.

Some very interesting things came out of this first session:

Since I was 16, I have been carrying around the following:

I’m evil.
I hate God.
I’m better than God.

He showed me how to do a mudra. It is for balancing things out. There are different kinds of mudras, but with this particular one you make fists with both hands, and then you place your right wrist goes over your left wrist.

My whole life I’ve had a tendency to beat myself up over my mistakes in an incredibly ferocious way. Manfred said I needed to tell my super ego that its job was to provide modest course corrections, not to disembowel me. I found that simply having this conversation with my “ego” actually made a big difference, and it started going much easier on me.

It only took a few sessions for Manfred to discover why my field was continually getting reversed. He told me that my lack of success in relationships meant that I wasn’t congruent enough to be facilitating Radical Truth. This incongruency was why I could never hold on to clients for very long. He told me that I needed to quit my practice and do something else.

As you might guess, this was the last thing I wanted to hear.

At first, I refused to believe it. But then, in the middle of a session with a client, I suddenly got a sore throat. I knew what this meant: My energy field had reversed, and I could no longer trust the accuracy of my testing.

There was no more denying it. I now knew that Manfred was right. And I knew that if I tried to continue on I would lead someone down the wrong road. Even worse, I knew that my own level of consciousness would certainly collapse, and all my spiritual gains of the past few years would be lost. To continue on when I knew my testing accuracy was compromised could only end in disaster.

So I closed my Radical Truth practice.

And I was absolutely devastated.

I had just quit my job only a few months before, and now I had nothing. It was really starting to feel like I was cursed. I simply could not do anything right. It seemed like almost everything I had ever tried to do in my life had blown up in my face.

As much as I wanted to pretend otherwise, it was clear now there was only one path forward for me. I would need to face and conquer the many fears that had crippled me my entire life. It was the only way I could ever become the kind of person I wanted to be.

It was the only way.

But some of these fears were more like terrors. And I was terrified of them.

And so I found myself standing before a mountain that I had no idea how to climb.

Still, I was able to take some solace in a few things. First, I had dodged a bullet (thanks to Manfred). Second, I had considerable savings, enough to last me for some time. This would turn out to be crucial in the year ahead.

In the end, I decided the best way to tackle the challenge that lay before me would be to approach it in small steps. Taking one small step at a time isn’t too difficult and feels a lot less daunting.

I decided to take swing dancing classes. It was a way to start meeting people and facing my fears on a small level, and I was soon making small incremental progress.

Simply asking a girl to dance was really scary in the beginning, but I was eventually able to do it. Manfred showed me how to do a technique called EFT Tapping which involves tapping your finger on a number of the body's acupressure points. I did this whenever I was feeling afraid, and it would cause the fear to diminish. I was going to these dance classes once a week for around two months, and it seemed to be going reasonably well.

But in late December there was an incident. Without going into detail, let’s just say that a woman rejected me.

I took it hard. Really hard.

Actually, I was in absolute agony.

I emailed Manfred and asked for an emergency session. Fortunately, he was available that very night.

When the session began, I told him that the feeling I was experiencing felt worse than death.

He did some testing, and he discovered something.

When I was two years old, my mom had a bad day, and she rejected me. I didn’t take it well.

And so I created a belief:

Rejection equals death.

Suddenly, my terrible fear of rejection now made sense.

Manfred said this was karmic. I had done something bad in a previous lifetime, and so this fear of rejection was my comeuppance.
I was able to let go of the belief, but this fear went deeper than any single belief. I wasn’t even close to being out of the woods yet.

Soon 2019 came, and I couldn’t have known it at the time, but this would turn out to be the craziest, most insane year of my entire life. Everything that I had previously experienced over the past few years would be almost nothing compared to what I would experience over the next 12 months.

It all began on January 25 when I was contacted by Steve, the man I mentioned earlier who had been one of my first Radical Truth clients. Over the past year, he had been doing sessions with Manfred. He sent me a message via Facebook Messenger:
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“You doing Iboga?”

“Sorry?” I replied. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He then messaged me a website link for the Iboga Wellness Center in Costa Rica.

“You have to try this,” he wrote. He said that he was just there and had done Iboga. He said Manfred had done Iboga several months ago and that Elsa was currently there as we were speaking.

Elsa had messaged me a couple of weeks earlier saying that she was preparing to leave the country, but she hadn’t said why. And Manfred had never mentioned Iboga, so I was completely in the dark.

Steve quickly called me on the phone to explain everything. He was really excited. He told me about Iboga, a psychedelic plant medicine that can help you make enormous spiritual advances in the span of a day or two. Imagine Radical Truth on mega steroids.

“It’s a shortcut,” Steve said of Iboga. He said he went there with the goal of reaching Love (i.e. the 500s). And it actually happened! Overall, he had a really great experience with only one dark period. He also was able to meet the spirit of David Hawkins and absorb his spiritual aura (just as I had when I met him in 2009). He said it was the best money he had ever spent.

I realized this could be the answer to getting rid of my fears. Steve agreed.

The next day, I had a session with Manfred. I asked him about Iboga and why he had never mentioned it to me. He replied that he wasn’t sure I was ready for it.

At one point in the conversation, I found my resolve.

“I can live with being alone,” I said. “I can’t live with being afraid.”

My resolve must have been pretty strong because that was all Manfred needed to hear.

“Go,” he said. “Just go.”

The next day, I sent a deposit to reserve a spot for an Iboga retreat that would begin in the first week of March.

My resolve may have been strong at the time, but it would quickly be tested. Levi, the man who ran the Iboga center, casually mentioned to someone that I had signed up for the retreat, and Elsa, who was still there, overheard him. She quickly ran back to her room and messaged me via Facebook Messenger.

Elsa was really concerned for me. She said that doing Iboga was grueling, the most difficult thing she had ever done, more difficult than even childbirth.

For some people, Iboga will remove their negative blocks, but each block gets one last shot at the person on the way out, and it isn’t a pleasant experience. For some, this is the price of the “shortcut” that Iboga offers.

But I wasn’t getting the impression that only some people experienced this. Elsa was making it sound like this was the experience of most people.

Elsa’s Iboga journey lasted 24 hours, but the medicine slows down time, so it must have felt longer than that. Her goal was that she wanted to see herself the way God sees her, and she spent almost the entire time taking hit after grueling hit as the medicine slowly removed all the negative blocks that were preventing this.

Elsa didn’t regret it, though. When it was finally over, she had met her true self.

After hearing all this, I was rattled. I wrote back, “Now you’ve got me worried.”

“You should be worried,” she replied.

I quickly emailed Manfred, asking him for more details about his Iboga experience.

His reply was vague: “I found it to be extremely challenging and extremely rewarding.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring. I soon called Levi and told him my concerns. He told me that most people don’t have an experience as difficult as Elsa’s. The medicine actually has an intelligence to it, and it won’t hit you with anything that you can’t handle. He also said that I could take a lighter dose of the medicine if I wanted to.

I felt somewhat better after that. It didn’t seem like I had much choice. It was hard to imagine how I would ever be free of my fear otherwise.
I once heard a lecture that really spoke to this. The lecture discussed the Disney film Pinocchio. In the story, Pinocchio attempts to free himself from the forces that manipulate him as a puppet in order to become an autonomous being. To do this, he is required to go to the deepest darkest place and voluntarily face the worst monster imaginable. This is one of the oldest ideas, that you have to journey to the darkest abyss to achieve true freedom.

This is actually a great analogy for Iboga. With Iboga, you face what is inside you. You face the deepest darkest things that are inside you so you can be rid of them. The lecture also said that you can never discover what you are truly capable of if you hide away from the things in life that are terrible.

Now if Iboga is capable of dramatically increasing a person’s level of consciousness, of facilitating such incredible spiritual growth, you might wonder why word about it hasn’t gotten out given that Iboga has been around for over two thousand years. The answer is that no one was apparently aware of its ability to do this until recently. In fact, it was Manfred who made this discovery. So in addition to creating Radical Truth, also credit him with discovering this amazing spiritual shortcut.

I had a little over a month before the retreat began, and Elsa recommended that I started praying for the medicine to start healing me right now. I did this, and soon I felt a major shift. My level of consciousness actually went up. I was close to 575 (Ecstasy), and I was feeling amazing, so much so that it almost felt like I didn’t need to do Iboga.

In fact, the day before my flight I was feeling so good that I decided to pull out. I actually decided not to go. But I still called Manfred and asked him if I was acting out of fear.

“How honest do you want me to be?” he asked.

“Brutally honest,” I replied.

He laughed and said that I was indeed acting out of fear even though the fear was unconscious. He strongly suggested that I go to the retreat.

Thankfully, I took his advice.

It snowed the Friday morning that I flew out from the northeastern part of the U.S., so it was nice to arrive in Costa Rica and experience a warm climate where there was no humidity. I had never been that far south before. I didn’t see much of the country, but from what I did see it looked like Costa Rica was stuck in the 1970s. There wasn’t much that looked modern, but the people there are said to be happier on average than most people who live in the West.

The house used for Iboga was really impressive and very spiritual-looking on the inside. There was an old cannon sitting on the front lawn, a swimming pool in the back, and a goat farm just beyond the backyard fence. An extremely tall coconut tree stood at the edge of this fence, and we were told not to stand directly under it because if any of its coconuts fell, they were heavy enough to kill you.

The tropical trees on the property were filled with what were known as howling monkeys. The name was appropriate because you could often hear them howling at all times of day and night. You could occasionally see them swinging through the trees. They generally stayed clear of people, but if threatened they were physically strong enough to tear you apart.

Three of the people working there - Levi, Mark, and Chelsea - were all former drug addicts who had been cured by Iboga. What is amazing is that Iboga not only cures addiction; it completely snuffs it out so the person never has to attend a support group because there is zero chance of a relapse.

There was also a doctor present, so the Iboga people were well-prepared for any medical complications that might arise.
I was in a group with six other people. One of them was a woman whom I actually knew because, ironically, I had once done a Radical Truth session with her. Several of the attendees were addicts who were in recovery.

The retreat started on Saturday, but we wouldn’t take the medicine until Sunday night. I was fine all day Saturday, but Sunday morning that changed.

At one point, something inside me just snapped.

In an instant, I decided that I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t do Iboga. It’s amazing how my fear took me over so quickly, but that’s what happened.

When Levi visited my room a short time later, I told him that I was out. He tried to convince me otherwise, reiterating that I would be taking a smaller dose of the medicine and that it wouldn’t be that bad. When he left, I was undecided.

I was absolutely terrified. I felt like I couldn’t go forward, but I also felt like I couldn’t go back. What was this like? Imagine having your head inside a vice and slowly being squeezed. It was sheer agony.

It may well have been the bleakest moment of my entire life.

But, ultimately, I decided that I had to go forward. I had to do Iboga. I couldn’t return home in defeat. My entire life had seemingly been one defeat after another. I couldn’t bear to go down in defeat again.

Iboga was my last hope. I simply had no choice.

Once I made the decision, I felt better. But I was still rattled.

We had our last meal at 2 pm that day, and we were encouraged to eat a lot of food to carry us through what might be a long ordeal. After 5 pm we were only allowed to drink water because your stomach needs to be empty when you take the medicine. You also tend to get dehydrated from the medicine, so it's important to drink water throughout the entire experience, even if it is only small sips.

The first “ceremony” was held that night around 9 pm, and we all sat around a campfire outside the house. We talked for an hour about Iboga and our goals, and then the medicine was given to us. I received a capsule (which meant a smaller dose) while everyone else took the medicine raw. Taking a capsule allowed me to avoid having to taste the medicine (which has a very bitter, acidic taste). I was the first in the group to really feel the medicine hit me. Mark helped me walk to a mattress that was laid outside near the swimming pool under what looked like an African hut. When you are under the influence of the medicine, you have no equilibrium so you can’t walk on your own.

We were all lying outside under the stars. There was definitely an African vibe to the whole experience, which felt appropriate since the Iboga medicine originated in Africa. They also played African Bwiti music which was okay, but the repetition of the same few songs over the course of several hours could sometimes get on your nerves.

Within the hour, I started to see visions. The medicine actually has fun with you in the beginning. It sends you all kinds of funny and amusing visions with no rhyme or reason to any of them.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to make it fun for everyone. Before long, everyone around me started to throw up (We were each given vomit buckets). One woman who was in recovery from drugs must have thrown up about 18 times over the entire course of the night. For her, the vomiting was no doubt part of the healing process because it expelled all the toxicity out of her system. I was the only one in the group who didn’t vomit.

But it wasn’t long before something inside me snapped again. I was suddenly filled with fear. I became so scared that I was no longer willing to allow the medicine heal me. And if you aren’t willing, it won’t. This went on for two and a half hours.

Finally, I managed to get a hold of myself. I began to think of all the people I would be able to help if I could remove my fears and return to facilitating Radical Truth. Could I be willing to suffer whatever pain I might have to for their sake?

My answer, thank God, was yes.

And so I closed my eyes and told the medicine that I was now willing to be healed.

Suddenly, the visions changed.

I now saw visions of hideous, ugly monsters. They were obviously meant to represent my fears. But there was no physical discomfort or pain that accompanied them. None! I could hardly believe my good fortune.

The visions were incredibly detailed. Although they were hideous, they were still interesting to look at. Often, a monster would morph into a different one. The most common one I saw looked like a flying sea monster with a very long tail. The monsters would often get in my face and lash out at me, but there was nothing to fear as they couldn’t hurt me. As each monster came and went, Iboga was removing my fears bit by bit.

This went on for hours. Around 5 am, something happened. All of a sudden, I felt the sweetest emotion you could ever imagine.

Ecstasy.

It just filled me up inside, encompassing my entire self.

And then I burst into tears. I was absolutely sobbing with joy, and I couldn’t stop. The tears kept coming, but they were the most wonderful tears I’ve ever shed.

My level of consciousness had jumped to 590. I was now on the cusp of enlightenment.

I had barely fallen over the finish line, but somehow, by the grace of God, I had made it.

And it was, without a doubt, the greatest victory of my entire life.

When I left Costa Rica, it felt like I had truly reached the top of the mountain, and I was really excited about the future that lay ahead. I couldn’t imagine it being anything less than incredible.

I’m sure many people will want to know what life is like at this level. They probably imagine that it must feel like perfection. Well, it initially does. It feels like the kind of high that you can only get from a drug. It’s hard to imagine how you could ever feel bad again.

Unfortunately, the feeling can easily become diluted during the course of everyday life. When you are caught up in your thoughts, when you are focused on doing a particular task, the feeling of ecstasy can fade. But there are also times when the feeling can become so intense that it is actually painful. So as wonderful as this level is, it is not perfection.

As it turns out, I was mistaken to think that my spiritual journey was almost over. More still lay ahead. More than I could have ever imagined.
Soon after I got back home, I did a session with Manfred. My first question was if I could start facilitating Radical Truth again. Unfortunately, Manfred said I wasn’t ready yet. He also said the biggest danger for me was spiritual pride as this has brought down many people who have reached the 500s and higher. I needed to be careful not to get too comfortable or this new state could turn into a grave.

A month later, I realized something. And it wasn’t pleasant. I realized that my fear of approaching women wasn’t completely gone. I also learned there was an inner resistance due to a desire to control God. I was rebelling against God. If He was going to make things hard for me, then I was simply going to take my ball and go home.

I couldn’t break through this no matter how hard I tried. And I soon realized something else:

I had short-changed myself by not taking the full dose of the medicine.

The fear was no longer overwhelming. It was no longer a terror. But this didn’t matter if I couldn’t get myself to stop resisting.

So I had climbed one mountain only to find another one just as large now blocking my path.

Soon after, I told Manfred that I was thinking about doing Iboga again. He actually thought it was a good idea. On the surface, going back to Costa Rica probably seems crazy, but I had the free time, I had the money, and if I didn’t do it then, I might never have gotten the chance again.

So I signed up for another Iboga retreat that would take place during the last week of June.

Manfred told me I should set in my mind the following goals for Iboga:

I want to see the source of my fear.
I want to find the courage to face my fear.
I would now see and understand the full extent of my willful desire to control every aspect of my life.
I would now see the full extent of my willfulness and what it has done to my life.

Manfred said I needed to have the following attitude:

I will face the source of this fear.
I will face what is inside me no matter what.
Even if it kills me.

But I soon began wavering. A little over a month before the retreat, I told Manfred that I was thinking of taking a light dose of the medicine instead.

“You’re spiritual bypassing!” Manfred said.

He became angry, and he let me have it.

“You need to take the FULL dose of the medicine!”

I shuddered at his words. I didn’t want to risk having the difficult journey that Elsa did. But Manfred made it clear that there could be no half-measures this time. Not if I was serious about making the changes I wanted to make.

I realized he was right. But I was still scared.

“Wow, this really is the most difficult path,” I said with trepidation.

“That’s why most people aren’t willing to do it!” Manfred replied.

When the session ended, I thought I was okay. But the next day I was completely freaking out.

I was in a full-blown panic. I felt like there was no way I would be able to do this, and yet I had already made a deposit on the room and paid for the airline tickets, all of which was non-refundable. So I felt trapped. But the idea of having to go on with my life and still have these limitations was pure agony.

Fortunately, I was able to get on the phone that night with Steve, the former client who had first told me about Iboga. He did a great job calming me down. He reminded me that many people have a light journey even when taking the full dose of the medicine. Although there were no guarantees, he thought I would likely have it easy.

In the end, I realized that the only way I could ever hope to become the person I truly wanted to be was to do the things that most people aren’t willing to do.

And I realized that if I could go back to that retreat and take the full dose of the medicine, that act alone might do me more good than anything else.

So I spent the next few weeks preparing myself. But, as it turned out, an enormous bombshell was to drop before the retreat.

On June 7th, I had another session with Manfred. This would be a session that would turn my entire world upside down, to put it mildly.
Near the end, Manfred discovered a program that had been running me since age 2:

I shouldn’t have to do this.

Suddenly, I knew why every task I tried to do had always felt so difficult and painful. For my whole life, I’ve had this artificial gravity weighing me down. Using the Letting Go method, I was able to quickly release it.

But as revealing as this was, it wasn’t the world-turning part of the session. That came next.

Manfred discovered another program. From age 6:

I will screw this game up.

My eyes went wide. “What? Why? Why would I create that?”

“For certainty and control,” Manfred replied.

By always failing (i.e. screwing up), I could always have certainty about what would happen, and because failing is easy I could also control exactly how and when it happened.

I was stunned. At that moment, my whole life flashed before my eyes: The mistake I made in high school. Failing to make friends in college. Getting fired. Never getting married. Making one terrible decision after another. Experiencing one failure after the next. Again and again and again. For forty years.

My entire life suddenly made sense.

It was self-sabotage.

I closed my eyes. I began using the Letting Go method on the program. Fifteen seconds later, my eyes opened.

“Is it gone?” I asked frantically. “Tell me it’s gone! Is it gone?”

A few seconds later, Manfred replied, “Yes!”

Then Manfred said something else to me. And as long as I live, I will never forget his words:

“John, you are a little sh--! But God still loves you!”
 
The next day, my mind was still reeling. How do you process something like that? How do you deal with it? It felt like more than any human being could possibly bear.
​
I honestly can’t remember ever creating that program, but there is something that I do remember. I’m not sure what age it was, but when I was very young there was one time when I was thinking about the future and all the challenges I would have to deal with: career, marriage, family, living in the world. And I remember feeling absolutely terrified at the uncertainty of it all. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed. I didn’t see how I could ever possibly do any of it. And, short of suicide, that program must have seemed like the only possible way out.

After learning the truth about what I had done, I just felt so ashamed. Throughout my life, I’ve disappointed people. I’ve hurt people. People that I cared about. People that I loved. And now I knew why. All because I didn’t have the courage to face the uncertainty of life. And so I threw my life away for a few measly crumbs.

When I think about this, it actually reminds me of a TV series called Twin Peaks. The show’s storyline had a number of spiritual elements in it. In the final episode, the main protagonist, FBI agent Dale Cooper, discovers the Black Lodge, an extra-dimensional location where dark forces reside. He enters and is then put to a test. But because he succumbs to fear, he fails this test. As a result, Cooper is trapped inside the Black Lodge for 25 years while his evil doppelganger is unleashed to terrorize the town of Twin Peaks.

As you might guess, I can relate to Cooper. To give in to fear and then be trapped in a nightmare for decades? I can relate to that a lot.
The lesson here is that there will be times when life will test you in major ways. If you succumb to fear, the result can be not just failure but disaster. This is why it is so important to be able to handle fear. If you can’t, it could very well destroy you.

Looking back, there were a number of times over the past few decades when my life could have been completely destroyed because of the self-sabotage program that was running me. One such time occurred only a few months earlier at the Iboga retreat. That night we took the medicine we were sitting around a large campfire. After the effects of the medicine hit me, I stupidly stood up before any of the Iboga people had a chance to react. At that moment, I somehow forgot that you have no balance or equilibrium when under the influence of the medicine. But I know now that it was an act of unconscious self-sabotage.

So I’m standing there, all wobbly, right in front of this large fire. Thankfully, something inside me told me not to move. Because if I had tried to take a step, I no doubt would have fallen face-first into the flames. It all almost ended for me right there.

There have been other close calls, other times when I came so close to the edge. Over the past few decades, my life could have been easily destroyed in any number of ways. That this didn’t happen I can only attribute to the grace of God. Someone up there had to have been watching over me.

I’m sure people will wonder how I was able to successfully do Radical Truth sessions with so many clients when I had this self-sabotage program. Looking back, I now realize that I would sometimes attempt to sabotage myself in different ways during those sessions, but somehow I was able to prevail regardless. As to how this was possible, I suspect it had to do with the deep level of prayer that was involved in the process.

It's embarrassing to publicly admit this. But I’m sure there are other people out there who have the same program that I did, and if I can help set even one person free from such a nightmare then it will be worth whatever embarrassment I may have to endure.

Do you find yourself making terrible decisions on an ongoing basis? Do those decisions seem logical in the moment but completely illogical later on? If so, then you may have a negative program that is causing you to unconsciously self-sabotage. The Clearing method in The Book of Answers can help you to release it.

It was on Friday, June 21st that I left for my second Iboga retreat. I have to admit that it felt surreal flying out again first to Atlanta and then to Costa Rica, the same flight trajectory from a few months earlier.

There are two seasons in Costa Rica: the dry season and the rainy season. This time I was to experience the rainy season, so the weather was not as welcoming as on my previous visit. But it didn’t matter as I wasn’t on vacation. No one does Iboga for fun.

I arrived almost a full day early before the retreat started, and the Iboga people were nice enough to let me stay at the house instead of having to check into a hostel for one night.

Saturday came, and then Sunday. The first ceremony was that evening. We would take the medicine a second time on Wednesday.
I spent much of Sunday morning outside on the front lawn of the house taking in the scenery and trying to prepare myself for what was to come. I didn’t want to experience a full-blown panic again as I had before.

I couldn’t help but think of a nice text message Elsa had sent me a few days before. She said she recently had a dream where she recontextualized the spiritual work we are doing:

I saw that we are actually all on a team and take turns pushing the envelope of what is possible. Kind of like the “Super Friends”. You are blazing a path for humanity. Actually, you are a modern day super hero of sorts. I woke up smiling because it all made sense. Especially because I know you love super hero movies and I am sure that you have never seen yourself as one. I see you as one. Do you know anything about bike racing? How the lead guy works the hardest and everyone else tucks in behind him to benefit from his draft? Then when he gets too tired to lead someone else takes over. I feel like we are all taking turns furthering what is possible. Each time one of us breaks through something difficult it makes it easier for all of us. God Bless you, John. I pray for a good journey. Thank you for having the courage to face whatever comes up. It is helping us all.

It really is true that every spiritual step we take forward, every increase in our level of consciousness, no matter how small, helps pave the way for others to do the same.

But most importantly, Elsa said, “You are going to be fine.”

Thinking of her words really helped me a lot.
​
I also started thinking about God and all the amazing things He has done for me, and I just started to fill up with gratitude. And the antidote for fear is gratitude. When you are in gratitude, it is impossible to be afraid.

For me, it was also about making the most of this lifetime, as so much of my life has felt like wasted time. No matter how you cut it, Iboga is the rarest of opportunities, a chance that few people ever get.

I didn’t know what lay ahead of me. I didn’t know how difficult the journey would be. But I knew the reward waiting at the end would be as sweet as heaven.

And so I had to take this giant leap. How could I not? And to be able to walk forward without fear was just incredible.

The ceremony took place around 9 pm that night. We all took the medicine. Because it was raining, we laid down on mats inside the house instead of outside. It wasn’t long before the visions started to appear. This time, however, the visions were much more clearer and detailed than before. It was like watching a super high-definition TV screen.

One vision was a close-up of a woman’s head. She looked strange, as if she was dressed up for Mardi Gras, and was making all kinds of weird faces. This lasted only a few seconds, and then the next vision was in black and white and was of a large group of people who looked like they were from the 1920s based on their clothing and top hats. They were all outside on a city street and jumping up and down with their backs to me. There were also visions of dragons and other fantasy creatures.

It was also possible to direct the visions. If I told the medicine, “Show me Star Wars,” I would get a vision of Star Wars with spaceships from those movies flying around. But the spaceships would look slightly different, so it was an alternate version of Star Wars. Still, it was really cool.
You could also ask the medicine to show you deceased people, as Steve did when he was able to meet the spirit of David Hawkins. I asked to see my pets from my childhood, and I actually saw a vision of them.

One thing I should make clear is that, when it comes to your goals, you don’t have to directly tell the medicine what you want it to do. You simply set your goals ahead of time, and the medicine will know exactly what it is that you want.

Unfortunately, the medicine didn’t agree with my stomach. I soon felt like I needed to throw up, so I leaned over my vomit bucket and purged. But nothing came up! I would purge two more times over the course of the night, but nothing came up. That definitely wasn’t fun. I hadn’t purged in almost 20 years, and I’d forgotten exactly how awful it felt, how it makes your eyes sting and all that. Gary, the medical doctor who was part of the Iboga staff, told me that there may have been some psychological block that prevented me from vomiting. He said it shouldn’t be a problem, but I was feeling a little scared.

Fortunately, my journey with the medicine was otherwise light. Aside from the visions, it felt like nothing happened, but the medicine often works in mysterious ways, and no two journeys are completely alike. Still, the purging was painful enough that I wasn’t sure I would be willing to take part in the next ceremony.

Tuesday was a recovery day of sorts. On Wednesday morning, I looked in the mirror and was almost horrified by what I saw. I had blood vessels popping out of my face and forehead. I looked just awful. The Iboga people told me it was probably due to stress and shouldn’t last. Fortunately, it didn’t.

I was able to get on a call with Manfred that day, as I felt like I needed some assurance that my inability to vomit wouldn’t put me in danger when I took the medicine again that night.

After telling him this, Manfred replied, “John, you’re a hypochondriac!”

He meant that I tend to take small things and blow them up. He was right (as always), and he helped give me the resolve to see Iboga through to the finish.

My spirits were lifted even more when I was told that I would be getting a lighter dose of the medicine that night. I had been given an extra high dose the first time and so I wouldn’t need as much this time around. I was really happy as I now felt certain that I would have a light, easy journey.

When I took the medicine that night, however, it didn’t seem like the dose was much lighter than the first one. I asked one of the Iboga people how long I might be under, and I was told me maybe ten hours.

At first, I felt real trepidation now that my certainty of a light, easy journey was gone. And the prospect of possibly taking hit after hit for ten hours was a real downer, but after a moment I was like, “All right. Ten hours. If that’s what it takes.”

The visions returned. There was one vision that kept repeating itself, and it was the strangest, most amazing vision I’ve ever had. It was like one of those videos on an arcade machine that keeps playing over and over and is meant to give you an overview of the game.

This vision presented Iboga as a video game. The words “PRESS START” kept blinking on a corner of the screen. The vision showed a glass oval in outer space and there were a large number of people inside. These were people participating in Iboga. The Iboga medicine would shoot energy beams and the people inside would try to dodge them. But some of the people would actually be hit and killed!

I saw myself inside this glass dome, but it was from a third-person perspective. I saw three of my fears listed on the top right corner of the screen (Fear of Rejection, Fear of Uncertainty, etc.). And then the Iboga medicine essentially fired three energy balls in my direction which were meant to represent each of these fears. I saw myself get electrocuted by an energy ball and then get propelled backward, and there was an up-close shot of my face slamming into the glass dome. It didn’t look like a pleasant experience.

I saw an entrance spot for people to enter the dome. And there was an operator, an evil-looking woman in a small booth who would let people in. One woman walked to the entrance spot and then gave the finger to the operator. The operator turned to her, smiled, held up a card, and said “I’ve got a ‘Kill anyone who gives the operator the flip’ card.” She then pushed a button and the woman was disintegrated. Really crazy.

This vision repeated itself at least three times with the words “PRESS START” constantly blinking. After the second or third time, I started thinking, “Am I supposed to metaphorically press a start button to get this thing to begin?” But the answer was no. It appears the medicine was just having fun with me.

I kept getting visions the rest of the night and into the next morning, but there was no discomfort. By 9 am I was thinking, “It didn’t work! Nothing happened!” I went to one of the Iboga people, and he said, “No, no, don’t assume it’s not working. The medicine works in its own way.”

I took him at his word. When the retreat was over, I spent an extra week in Costa Rica at a hostel. I used much of that time to read a spiritual book. For some reason, something about this book just clicked and I felt a shift occur.

It wasn’t a grand momentous moment like I had experienced during the first retreat, but it still felt pretty amazing. In fact, I don’t think my head had ever felt so clear.

But, most importantly, I had taken the full dose of the medicine. I didn’t go halfway. I didn’t retreat or give up. I faced my fear and overcame it, and that is something I’ll always take with me for the rest of my life.

Not long after I returned home, I went to a swing dance. There I saw a woman that I wanted to ask out. Suddenly, I felt fear. It wasn’t paralyzing like it had been in the past, though, and I was able to muscle through it and ask her. Her answer was no, but I was satisfied that I was able to go through with it. Still, I have to admit I was disappointed that my fear of asking women wasn’t completely gone.

I realize some people may read this and say, “You did Iboga twice, and yet you still had fear. Does Iboga really work?”

It is important to realize that while Iboga can do amazing things for you, it is not going to transform you into a perfect human being. Most people mistakenly think that if they could change just one thing about themselves, then they would be fine. In reality, you probably have multiple issues that are holding you back (and Radical Truth can be extremely helpful in discovering exactly what those issues are). Also, each issue likely has multiple layers to it which cannot all be resolved at once. Add all this up, and it should be clear why it is so difficult for people to change.

I believe now that my remaining fear was likely due to other issues that I had yet to deal with, issues that I was completely oblivious about. But those issues would soon come to light.

In early September I had a session with Manfred. In the three days leading up to the session, I felt really amazing, as good as I could ever remember feeling. It seemed like I was in a great place.

But as I sat down for my video call with Manfred, I never could have imagined what was about to happen. I never could have imagined that my life was about to descend into the 7th level of hell.

At the beginning of our session, which took place on a Friday night, I started off by saying just how great I’d been feeling.

“You’re reversed,” Manfred replied.

I was puzzled by this. “How can that be? How can I be reversed when I’m feeling this good?”

A few seconds later, I get an answer.

“You’re in a delusion.”

A delusion based on spiritual pride. And then Manfred drops the bombshell of all bombshells: He tells me that my level of consciousness has fallen from the 500s all the way down to the 200s. A complete and total spiritual collapse.

At that very moment, my delusion shatters. And with it goes the wonderful feeling I’d been experiencing. I suddenly have tears in my eyes as it feels like I've just been gut-punched. All the spiritual work I had done over the years, and now it might all have been for nothing. The 500s were gone. The same tragic fate that had befallen so many others had now befallen me as well. I had been brought down by spiritual pride.
By the end of our session, Manfred managed to get my LOC back up to the 300s, but it was little consolation. I felt like I had lost everything.
Amazingly, Manfred made light of it all.

“Being in the 500s was your one little badge,” he said in a teasing sort of way.

But as devastating as this was, my troubles were just beginning. My pride had been a barrier that was holding back an ocean of grief. Grief that I had suppressed. Grief that had been building up for decades.

By the next day, all this grief had broken through the dam, and it hit me like a tidal wave.

I was in absolute agony, perhaps the worst agony I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. I couldn’t believe I had suppressed so much pain, but now it was finally free and there was no escape from it.

I tried using the Letting Go method to release it. I didn’t resist it, I did everything I could to run it out, but it just kept coming and coming and coming. It seemed endless. And it was a nightmare.

This continued all day Saturday and all day Sunday. By Sunday night I’d had enough. I sent an email to Manfred: "I need another session. ASAP."

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long.

The very next night, we begin another session.

"You’re not reversed,” Manfred says.

For once. Anyway, there was no need this time for Manfred to test for an issue for us to work on. The issue was obvious.

So I start releasing the grief again. Whenever the grief died down, Manfred used muscle testing to figure out how to tap back into it and bring more up. We needed to keep bringing it up so I could get rid of it. So I kept releasing the grief using the Letting Go method, then inviting love into it and all that.

It took us 40 minutes to release it all. And the whole time I just kept crying and crying. Try to imagine crying almost non-stop for 40 minutes straight. Try to imagine grief falling down on top of you as if it were rain. I’ve had some tough Radical Truth sessions before, but this was just insane.

When it was all finally all over, I felt a lot better. But I suspected there was a lot more grief deep down that I would still have to deal with.
Manfred agreed. “The human psyche is inherently merciful,” he added. “If you were capable of feeling all your pain at once, it would probably kill you.”

Manfred also told me about the importance of experiencing the full horror of your mistakes. If you don’t, if you suppress your pain, it will eventually come back and bite you in a big way. As I had just discovered.

Although I was feeling better, it was still a far cry from where I had been. Over the next few days, it felt like I was always standing in a haze. It was like being droopy. I didn't like it at all.

But then something else suddenly rose up to the surface.

Anger.

I started to feel just an incredible amount of anger, so much that it was almost overwhelming. Anger at life. Anger at God. Anger at other people. It was pure, unbridled rage.

I’ve never been one to show anger. Instead, I would usually cover up my anger by going into apathy (something that many people do). But suppressing the anger only caused it to build up inside. Like my grief, it had been building up for decades. And, like my grief, it was now free.
On top of that, there were even more painful things coming up in my sessions with Manfred.
​
Since age 5, there had been a desire to do the bare minimum.

I don’t want to. Beneath this there was rage.

There was a refusal to participate which I would do for certainty. I would never risk being the fool.

But Manfred said that the fool is actually a holy character. In Shakespeare’s plays, the fool is wiser than everyone else. I needed to be willing to play the fool.

I’ve been a phony. My whole life I’ve been saying, “Please like me.” I've been so addicted to getting approval from other people that I had no idea who I even was. That was why I had so much self-loathing. I was also afraid that people would see through my mask.

As you might guess, none of this was fun to hear. Instead of Radical Truth, perhaps it should be called Gut-wrenching Truth.

Over the next several weeks, I was still going through hell. There was just so much anger, so much grief, so much pain. In early October, I visited my old university for Homecoming weekend in the hope that it would make me feel better, but I was miserable the entire time.
In the 1937 film Lost Horizon, a man discovers a paradise deep in the mountains known as Shangri-La which represents the ultimate state. Eventually, he leaves, but soon he realizes his mistake and becomes willing to do anything, no matter how extreme, to return to it.
This is exactly how I felt in regard to my spiritual fall. Having lost paradise, I was desperate to find a way back.

And so it wasn’t long before one thought started running through my mind:

I need to do Iboga.

Going back to Costa Rica again wasn’t an option. Instead, I thought about ordering the Iboga medicine through the mail and taking it at my house. But then I contacted Steve and told him about my plight. As it turned out, he had done some Iboga training and offered to guide me through an Iboga ceremony. Even better, he would do it for only the cost of the medicine.

Doing Iboga again was risky. I might wind up having a really difficult journey this time as Elsa did. But I didn’t feel like there was any other choice. I couldn’t go on living with this pain. I just couldn’t. I had to find a way back to Shangri-La. No matter what I might have to endure.
When I told Elsa that I was doing Iboga again, she could hardly believe it. I then told her that my LOC had collapsed. She said, “John, this happens to everyone.”

She said it even happened to her. She argued that there is only so much spiritual benefit that you can get from doing Iboga and that at a certain point you are not likely to get anything more out of the experience. But I wasn’t hearing any of it. I was determined to go forward.

Manfred, on the other hand, was more optimistic. When I emailed him about my chance to do Iboga again, he replied, “That is good fortune!”
Steve was originally willing to do the Iboga ceremony at his house, but at the last minute that location was no longer an option. I was scrambling to find a hotel for us to use, but Steve insisted that the hotel be no more than 15 minutes from his house.

The situation was starting to look bleak. I looked at a list of hotels in the area, and they were all pretty expensive. Too expensive. Except for one. There was one hotel that had a really nice price. I put its address into Google Maps, and guess what? It was exactly 15 minutes from Steve’s house.

It was beginning to feel like the universe was opening a path for me to do this. It had to be a sign.

On October 22, I made the drive to a city that I will not name. The drive took a couple of hours. I was actually born in this particular city, so it was pretty ironic in a way. Here I was, returning to the city where I was born in the hope of being re-born.

Before I set out, I sent an email to Manfred asking him to pray for me. He answered back, “All will be well, John.”

I arrived around 2 pm, roughly 6 hours before Steve would arrive with the medicine. Getting there really early was important so I would have ample time to prepare myself. My main goal for this particular Iboga journey was to remove all my grief and anger. If I could just do that, I figured everything else would fall into place.

I rented a room with two single beds, one for me, and one for Steve. The hotel itself was pretty old, and my room certainly had none of the charm of the Iboga house in Costa Rica. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t go online. I spent the hours I had just trying to stay relaxed. Trying to prepare for what could be the most difficult thing I’d ever do.

Steve arrived around 8 pm. It was good to see him again, although I couldn’t muster much good cheer. For the ceremony, he lit candles throughout the room because artificial light isn’t ideal when you are under the influence of the medicine.

Steve did make one major change from the Costa Rica retreat. Instead of playing African Bwiti music which only calibrates in the 200s, he played the music of Robert Gass which is in the 700s. Music that calibrates at an extremely high energy level can really enhance the effects of the medicine and the whole experience overall.

So I finally took the medicine and then laid down on my bed. But then I started to feel something come up. Something very alarming.
Fear.

I didn’t feel it earlier, but I sure felt it now. The fear was strong enough that I wasn’t sure if I’d be willing to let the medicine heal me. And if you aren’t willing, it won’t.

I couldn’t allow myself to sabotage this. So I imagined myself drifting, as if in a river, slowly being pulled in the direction God wanted me to go, without resisting. I had to trust God. I had to trust that everything in the end would be all right.

By doing this, through non-resistance, I soon was able to let go of the fear and find the willingness to allow the medicine to heal me.

Three hours later, something happened.

Something I can only describe as a miracle.

As I’m lying there, my mouth suddenly starts to smile all on its own with no effort on my part. This smile curves into a deep grin. And then, in a giant rush, I am filled with joy.

It was ecstasy. Pure sweet ecstasy.

Returning to me like an old friend.

And it was, quite simply, one of the greatest moments of my entire life.

No doubt about it. I was back in the high 500s again. I had returned to Shangri-La. Could it really have been so easy? Apparently, yes!
Iboga is truly a gift from God.

It just felt so amazing. I don’t think there are words to describe just how amazing this felt.

Let me put it this way: If there was ever such a thing as Heaven on Earth, this was it!

Iboga had taken all my pain and snuffed it out like it was nothing. But as incredible as this was, as miraculous as this was, my Iboga journey wasn’t finished.

Another goal I had was that I wanted to be able to love working. For most of my life, I’ve had inner resistance to doing hard work. Well, the visions were back again, and at one point the visions I was seeing started to form words:

I Love Working
Love Is Work
Work Is Love

These phrases kept blinking and blinking and it soon felt like they were being ingrained in me. I actually started to feel that work is love.

I Love Working!

I was both feeling it and believing it.

Another goal I set for myself was to find a way to deal with my self-loathing. At one point, I had a vision of the words “I Love Myself.” The words started flashing and blinking. This kept happening, and soon it again began to feel like the phrase was being ingrained in me.

I Love Myself! I Love Myself!

After just a minute or two, it began to feel like there was no other possibility.

There was a dark side to my journey, however. Two days in, I started to get visions that were violent, disgusting, and deeply disturbing. It was really upsetting, and I had to turn the lights on in my room to not see them. Later, I learned what was happening. The medicine was removing negative blocks and programs. When it does this, you see a vision representing each block/program as it is on its way out. But this brief dark episode was a small price to pay for the incredible gains I had made.

When I finally headed for home, I was truly reborn. And I will forever be grateful for the second chance God had given me.

Soon after, I discovered something. My fear of approaching women was completely gone! I was able to walk up to a woman and ask her out, and I felt no fear at all. It was amazing! I had to do Iboga three times for this to finally happen, but apparently, the third time was the charm!

But if I thought I had finally reached the top of the mountain, it wasn’t long before I discovered that there was still more climbing to be done.

Only a few weeks later, I was having another session with Manfred. He discovered a trait that I had. It was a trait I had been blind to. He blurted it out.

“Selfish!”

It took some time to fully comprehend what Manfred had said. I had always thought of myself as basically a good person. I certainly never thought of myself as selfish.

But as I looked back on my life, for the first time I started to see things differently. I started to see all the times when I wasn’t quite such a good person.
​
All the times when I didn’t give my best. When I did the bare minimum. When I refused to be generous. When I broke the rules because I thought I could get away with it. When I took what I wanted even though I didn’t deserve it, even at the expense of others.

Suddenly, it was all so clear.

Selfish.

It was true.

When I realized this, it was pretty painful. To have my precious self-image shattered before my very eyes…

It may have been the most humbling moment of my entire life.

You could say I was metaphorically down on my knees. And I was down on them for a long time. But when I finally rose up, I made a vow.
I resolved that I would become a better person.

From now on, I would be generous when it came to others, not stingy. I would go the extra mile rather than do as little as I could get away with. And I would follow the rules even when they didn’t seem fair.

But most of all, I would always act with integrity in everything I did. I might lose it all, but I would never lose my integrity.

No matter what.

That was my vow.
​
And it wasn’t long before I discovered something. I discovered that when you are selfish, life is more painful. When you are stingy, you always feel like there is never enough. But when you are generous, you always feel like there is plenty to spare.

So the only way to ever truly feel rich is to be generous. If you are stingy, you will always feel poor, at least on some level, no matter how much money you have.

I also can see now why most people refuse to honestly look at themselves. Their self-image is simply too precious, and so they will unconsciously diminish anything that contradicts it. This is a large reason why it is so hard for people to change. They simply refuse to see what’s wrong with themselves. Instead, they project onto others.

I’ve felt a lot of shame about the person that I was, the ways that I’ve acted, and a lot of the things that I’ve done. But this has helped me in one way. I realize now that even if I hadn’t had all those fears, even if I hadn’t created that self-sabotage program, my life still wouldn’t have been all that great. Why? Because I still would have been a selfish person.

So I had cleared another hurdle. Yet on December 2nd, I hit another one. I woke up around 3:30 am with my throat in agony. I had the most painful sore throat I can ever remember having. I emailed Manfred, and he replied that I had no less than 5 viral infections.

I was experiencing these infections because of a seemingly benign incident. I had gone to a club that night and was talking with a woman, but I had approached it as an intellectual exercise rather than trying to make an actual connection.

It probably sounds very odd that something so small could cause me to get sick, but when you reach the higher levels you need to be fully aligned with truth and integrity. If you are not, even in the smallest way, you get whacked. Hard. So whenever I get a sore throat or a headache, I don’t reach for the medicine cabinet. I start muscle testing to find out what error I am committing either consciously or unconsciously.

Manfred identified other issues that were coming up. At age 8, I decided that I would float above the world without ever really participating in it. I also believed I was better than other people. This was apparently done as a way to prop myself up despite my own self-loathing. With Manfred’s help, I tried to change it, but nothing would budge. It was too deeply ingrained.

Soon I was in agony over this. It began to feel unbearable. I felt like I had to change this. No matter what it took.

So guess what I started thinking?

I need to do Iboga.

And so on December 9th, I was back with Steve in the same city at the same hotel, and I did Iboga again.

It turned out to be a great experience from start to finish, and I was able to change those two things that I desperately wanted to change.

When it was all over, for the first time in my entire life, I felt like I was ready to go out and live in the world, to actually be a part of it. And I was really looking forward to it.

This would not be the last time I would do Iboga, but those other journeys aren’t worth going into. But I would like to mention a time when I started asking the medicine questions, and the visions gave me some amazing answers:
 
How do I let go of my excuses?
After asking the above question, the phrase "I CAN'T" appeared before me in a vision. And at this moment I realized that this was my biggest excuse.
 
Then the word "EXCUSES" appeared, and a few moments later it crumbled into dust. It was soon replaced by another phrase:
 
THERE ARE NO EXCUSES.
 
I want to see myself the way God sees me.
 
I had a vision of a baby inside an open cocoon in outer space. The cocoon was spinning very slowly.
 
My interpretation: This is how God sees each of us. As an intrinsically innocent baby, perfect in every way.
 
How to refuse the payoffs you get from negativity:
 
I had a vision of several people standing in a large circle facing inward. One woman, who had wings and looked like an angel from the Gospels, began to grow in size until she was 50 times the size of the others.
 
My interpretation: Rise higher.
 
How to see that there are no problems:
 
I had a vision of a large number of equally sized rocks coming together to form a single rock.
 
My interpretation: You may perceive something as a problem, but everything in life is ultimately the same. Everything is just a “rock”. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
How to view all actions you take as being equal, none more important than the other:
 
I had a vision of a 300-piece puzzle coming together.
 
My interpretation: The pieces of such a puzzle are so small. You could never say that any one piece is better or more important than another. But together they form something much greater.
 
How to find meaning and joy in every action you take:
 
I had a vision in the first-person perspective of a person with their arms stretched outwards, their palms facing me. There was a flat, two-dimensional star resting in each hand, covering the length of the palm.
 
My interpretation: Everything that you touch, you touch with the grace of the stars.
 
How to stop being enamored with yourself:
 
I had a vision of a person who was standing in front of a mirror making stupid, funny faces.
 
My interpretation: Make stupid, funny faces in the mirror.
 
How to be bold, daring, and courageous:
 
I had a vision in which I had a top-down view of someone taking a giant leap off of a ledge.
 
My interpretation: Be willing to take a “giant leap” by surrendering the outcome to God and trusting Him to “catch you” no matter what happens.
 
And that is all I have to say about Iboga.

It was also in December of that year that Manfred gave me what was perhaps the most profound advice I have ever received. He said I should have the goal of being of humble service to other people.

He then said something I will never forget:
 
The main reason most people never find God is that they don’t go low enough.
 
Most people want others to serve them. Or they want to serve themselves. Few people actually want to serve others. But those that do, those with a servant’s heart, those who are willing to go low, they are truly divine.

Amen.

It was around this time that I stopped doing regular weekly sessions with Manfred. This was partly because I wanted to start saving money but also because my life had stabilized. The crazy roller coaster ride I had been on was finally over.

Manfred Luck died a year later, in 2021. I will be forever grateful for what he did for me. He saved my life. He was truly a trailblazer, paving the spiritual path forward for myself and many others. Hopefully, I can honor his legacy by doing the same with this book.

I’ll always remember the last session I did with Manfred. It took place near the end of 2020. At the start of the session, Manfred said, “John, do you realize how much you’ve grown?”

I actually do. I’ve grown quite a bit, and it happened in such a relatively short period of time.

I attained salvation, lost it, got it back. I removed the terrifying fears that crippled me. And I got rid of the negative programs that almost destroyed me.

But most of all, I became a better person.

I stopped being selfish. And I learned to serve others.

All in all, not bad. Not too bad at all.

In fact, I’d say this is a life I can hang my hat on.

It took a long time, but I’m finally at peace with all the failures and disappointments I’ve experienced in my life. All the mistakes I made, all those things I wanted that I didn’t get, all those things I missed out on.

Why? Because I now realize that if I had gotten what I wanted, I never would have gotten this.

And, believe me, there is nothing sweeter than this.

Which brings us to the most important lesson of this book. You may not get what you want most in life. You may not get your dream. You may fall short. But, if this happens, you can be assured that God will give you something that is even better.

That is if you are open to it.

It all comes down to trusting God. Surrendering control. And walking down the path He lays before you.

This is the key. It is the key to unlocking a life that is more wondrous, more amazing than anything you could ever imagine.

So now you know my story. You probably aren’t quite sure what to make of it. Can such an insane story really be true? Well, do you really think I could make a story like this up?

As for Holy Christianity, most people will say we are crazy. I like to think we are radical. Because when you are way off course, only a radical course correction will get you to your destination. And as I recall, when a man appeared in Galilee roughly two thousand years ago preaching a new kingdom in which every man could walk upright and bow to no god but his own, that was pretty radical as well.

My point is that radical isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, every once in a while, it is exactly what you need.

So many people are pessimistic about the future of mankind. But the truth is that our future has never been brighter. Why? Because the path forward has never been more clear. And this is the path I now invite you to embark upon.

Will you join me?

The choice, of course, is yours.

The journey will not be easy. You will be tested in ways you could never imagine. You will have to look at yourself in ways that few are willing to do. You will have to face the darkness that lies within. This won’t always be fun. At times it will be gut-wrenching. But I guarantee you will never find a path more fulfilling or rewarding than this one.

Seriously, how many more lifetimes do you want to spend just going through the motions? Are you ready for real progress? I sure hope so.
In closing, with the completion of this new bible and the founding of this new church, restoring Christianity to the level of truth it had at its conception, it feels like I’ve finally found that purpose I’ve been searching my whole life for.

And as I stand here now taking in the view, I can honestly say it feels pretty amazing.

Actually, it feels like top of the mountain.

But my journey isn’t over. There are other mountains to climb. There always will be.

Ultimately, that is the purpose of life. Climbing mountains. One after another.
​
So are you ready to begin?

You better be. Because there is no time to waste.
 
Love always,
 
John Dorsey
 
July 19, 2022