BY SOUL’S CODE — Brooke Mueller is the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen who called 911 a couple of Christmas holidays ago in Aspen claiming that the Two and a Half Men star he was threatening her with a knife (listen to the tape here). Since then, they have both done revolving doors through rehab — and Mueller’s latest attempts and failures at sobriety are a highlight reel on Paris Hilton’s new reality TV show on the Oxygen network.

Mueller’s latest stab at AA-style 12 Steps has apparently failed again, and the gossip site TMZ reports that she made plans to fly to Cancun to undergo Ibogaine therapy.

Ibogaine is intense. It strips one bare of psychological defenses. It is also illegal in the U.S., which is why American addicts fly to places like Mexico, Colombia and Brazil for treatment.

Does Brooke have the psychic resilience and self-awareness to take a deep-dive into an Ibogaine trance, or will she shut down and have a bad trip? Will putting Ibogaine in this woman be the equivalent of filling a VW Beetle with jet fuel?

UPDATE: TMZ reported that Charlie Sheen retrieved his ex Brooke from Mexico in a private jet because he thought Ibogaine treatment was so dangerous she might die. Note, the issue isn’t Ibogaine itself but Brooke Mueller’s emotional depth and resilience.

Perhaps the first time that Ibogaine (or “Iboga”) was put out there in American popular culture was in Rolling Stone magazine writer Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Thompson satirically suggested that a Brazilian doctor had gotten the Democratic front-runner for president that year hooked on the drug. “It is entirely conceivable — given the known effects of Ibogaine — that (Edmund) Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.”

While Ibogaine is indeed a hallucinogen, Thompson got one thing wrong: it is not addictive. In fact, recovery circles across North America are now using it on the sly as a cure for addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The cutting-edge prescription for addiction currently promoted by the medical establishment is Topiramate, an anti-convulsion medication with questionable efficacy.

But Iboga is not approved by the U.S government.  It’s a free-growing plant that has been used in West Africa as a sacramental substance, and cannot be patented like a synthetic drug. No wonder it’s illegal.  “Ibogaine has really become notorious because it didn’t originate in a lab, but in the counterculture,” Stanley Glick, the director of the Center for Neuropharmacology and Neuroscience at Albany Medical College, told the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies Ibogaine alongside drugs like ecstasy and LSD with “high potential for abuse” and “no known medical value.” There are also reports that patients in Europe, where Ibogaine therapy is legal, died because it aggravated their heart conditions.

Both of those factors make it difficult for psycho-pharmacologists to win research grants. But a privately-funded research organization in Massachusetts, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, is currently conducting a long-term study of the effect of Iboga on heroin addicts.

Hunter S. Thompson got yet another thing tangled about Iboga: It’s from Africa not Brazil. In fact, it is processed into a brown powder from the bark of a root grown in Gabon (population: 1.5 million).

It has been used for centuries as a healing plant and in religious rites by the Bwiti people.  In 1962, Howard Lotsof, a heroin addict, got some Ibogaine from a chemist friend of his for a psychedelic trip.  He woke up from the Ibogaine miraculously devoid of any desire to use heroin.  His brain was apparently reset, and he reported no withdrawal symptoms.

The most popular proselytizer of Iboga in the West today — four decades after Thompson introduced it to a mass audience — is a British documentary filmmaker named David Graham Scott, whose “Detox or Die” is  YouTube viral phenom.

Hardcore scientists speculate that Ibogaine binds with the brain’s opiate receptors to pre-empt cravings.

But users argue that the underlying magic of the substance is spiritual: “Ibogaine allows one to ‘die’ of our former selves and be reborn clean and addiction-free,” one San Francisco Bay Area woman with a psychology degree who has tried Iboga told Soul’s Code.

How much does it cost? Has it worked for you?

The motto for this site is everyone’s a guru. We mean that Soul’s Code is a community platform where people can share their personal solutions for self-growth and peak experiences. As we have virtually no in-house experience with Ibogaine, we invite you to share yours below — and unlike on Facebook, you can Comment anonymously:

Dr. Philippe Goldin, a psychologist who heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience Group at Stanford University, runs a National Institutes of Health-funded lab that studies adults with social anxiety disorder, and offers training in mindfulness meditation.

We caught up with Dr. Goldin, who spent six years in India and Nepal studying various languages and Buddhist philosophy.

Soul’s Code: What’s the appeal of Buddhism for you?

GOLDIN: Androgyny. The goal— the ultimate goal — of mental development is to become completely inclusive of all qualities, and I thought that was incredible . . . That was a model of being that I had not been introduced to before — the way you could develop wisdom and compassion and skillfulness, that it’s not abstract, and that there are actual steps towards being able to train your mind. And that other people had done it, and you could do it too if you’re willing to make the effort.

Soul’s Code: Is that your personal spiritual practice?

GOLDIN: I lead meditation groups. I also try to practice every day — a little bit, formal and informal. What I call meaningful pauses, to redirect my attention to notice what’s happening in my mind, my body; observing habits and trying to let go.

Soul’s Code: Does your work confirm studies that have shown how monks have apparently boosted the capacity of their brains through thousands of hours of meditation?

GOLDIN: The people who are the superstars? Yeah, we do expect them to be different in some of the tests and measurements. But I’m more interested in how you can take the regular person and teach them skills to work with themselves. To me, that’s how you get at the masses.

I’m working with the regular Joe, with Joe the plumber. I’m really interested in the regular person, people who are suffering from depression, anxiety, stress and how you can teach them skills that they can learn to implement so that they can have their own direct experience working with their mind, introspection.

Soul’s Code: Is there heightened interest in your field now, given the stressful economic times?

GOLDIN: Now — and in fact, always. Our current culture is set up to induce fear. Most of the signals we have are about, ‘It’s not okay to be the way I am.’ That causes tension, anxiety and stress — be it economic, the fashion models in magazines, or how we’re supposed to be parents, or how we’re supposed to be children.

Our culture is really not very healthy, and the demands placed on people at work — inter-personally — is huge right now. There is tremendous stress and a real lack of training in how to be okay with oneself.

Soul’s Code: Is that the type of training you are doing at Google?

GOLDIN: Last spring I was contacted by them about doing a research study, and I just started more and more projects with them. Google is doing some fantastic work on developing programs to train employees in emotional balance and emotional intelligence. Everyone there is super intelligent, so pure IQ is not the issue.

They’re actually addressing how (to help employees) be able to be skillful with their own emotions, for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. Lots of companies recognize that if a person feels anxiety about coming to work, or has incredibly low self-esteem, or suffers from anxiety or depression, that that’s completely counterproductive.

Soul’s Code: Can people control how happy they feel?

GOLDIN: You could consider happiness a trait, but I think it’s a trainable skill. And that skill rides on psychological flexibility. And part of that is being able to be emotionally aware, and to be able to work with or regulate and modulate you’re emotions . . . To me, psychological flexibility is the basis for being happy and well.

World-record holder Sara Campbell uses yoga and deep trance-work to free dive to new depths of human experience and endurance (New Yorker)

Beyond belief: A mermaid sighting in Isreal? (Live Science)

Or a mystical dip in a Scottish Fairy Pool (UK Guardian)

Is consciousness like the ‘wetness of water’? What great minds can’t grasp (Live Science)

With escapism and the recession in mind: “Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop” (New York Times):

The Biology of Belief explains how near-death experience and meditation cause actual changes in the brain’s chemistry

As The Vatican, the American Public and Republican Christians remain divided on Ted Kennedy’s “State of Grace” and “very Catholic Funeral”, US scholars debate new ways to communicate with, or ex-communicate, God. Soul’s Code highlights the great divide!

Where Americans disagree: “Kennedy funeral rings with hope, Twitter with vitriol”

Edward Moore Kennedy wrote to the Pope: “I’ve never failed to believe”

God and the new anti-atheists

In recent years Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have been grouped under the banner “the new atheists”, a contemporary atheistic stab at debunking God’s existence and religious faith.  The new atheists certainly have theistic opponents, yet another, even smaller, group has entered the fray; call them the new non-theist anti-atheists. Terry Eagleton’s new book Faith, Reason and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate takes a decidedly non-theological stance in critiquing the new atheists, who, Eagleton argues, have little to no background in theology and each fails to understand the political nature of religion (due to their own fundamentalist atheism). A marxist critiquing atheists writing about religion is ironic in the extreme.

How God changes your brain

The word “liturgy” literally means “work of the people”; how about work for the brain? Andrew Newberg’s new book, ”How God Changes Your Brain”, argues that actions often deemed “religious” have beneficial mental effects. Theological speculation, meditative prayer, and performing elaborite rites can boost brain power according to Newberg, making spiritual practice an educational experience. In an age where rote memorization of prayers, thinking theologically at an early age, and greater involvement in liturgical rites are not popular in the US, Newberg’s findings may changes the minds of religious educators and parents.

Tweeting God

Alon Nir, an Israeli university student from Tel Aviv, has made tweeting God a possibility.  Prayers can be sent to Nir, printed on paper, and devoutly placed in crevices in the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Nir keeps the prayers confidential and removes the obstacle of distance for those unable to travel to Jerusalem and deliver the prayers in person. Though Nir is not asked to pray on behalf of those tweeting, he does play an intercessory role in bring the prayers to God in Judaism’s holiest site.

GUEST COLUMN: SANDY ANDREW — Have you ever found yourself in a casual situation when, suddenly, your consciousness flashes back to a memory that seems impossible to be valid?  After all, you have not experienced this situation yet, so how on earth could you have a memory of it?

This unique sensation is one our culture has labeled déjà vu.  But what is it exactly?

Is it a memory, a premonition, or just a confused state of mind?

In my case, I experienced déjà vu significantly for the first time when I was eleven years old as my mother told me she was not going to be living with my dad any more — they were divorcing. In an instant, I knew that I had witnessed this exact same scene before. But how could that have been possible? I never had an event in my young life that remotely resembled this in terms of a similar memory.

Like my discussion with my mother, most common experiences of déjà vu will happen while you’re, for example, chatting away to a friend in a restaurant, speaking about a serious topic, which results in you have a startling sensation of recognition. You think, “I’ve heard this before . . . but I couldn’t have.” You try to focus on the memory and it melts away. How this recollection can be possible is the question many people ask, and I hope to explain.

Can science alone explain the phenomena of déjà vu?

A French researcher, Émile Boirac (1851–1917) was the first to use the term “déjà vu” in his book, L’Avenir des sciences physiques (The Future of Psychic Sciences).

In recent years, déjà vu has been subject to psychological and neurophysiological research. One explanation of déjà vu is that it is not an act of premonition or clairvoyance, but rather an anomaly of physical memory from the human brain.

Recently published material from scientific research implies that the brain produces memories from the hippocampus region. A small section of this is called the dentate gyrus and is responsible for “episodic” memories which stores information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.

The dentate gyrus records a situation’s audio, visual, smell, sense of time, and other characteristics for the body’s future reference. When there is low performance from the dentate gyrus, the supposed memory problem of déjà vu occurs as the brain has difficulty in telling the difference between two extremely similar situations. In other words, the brain is not storing the lifetime memories well enough.

Apparently, as people age, déjà-vu-like confusion happens more often. It is also a frequent occurrence in people suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Let’s explore an alternative view

For many, déjà vu appears to go deeper into our psyche than brain oriented memories do. When you experience déjà vu you certainly can feel an emotional and unquantifiable sensation that is fundamentally different to remembering a lost memory, or sorting out information in your brain of who, where, what, and when an event transpired. Déjà vu just feels profoundly different than anything else we regularly encounter.

But, how can our human brains lose or distort memories of a foreign land, person, building, or tangible item that we have never seen before? And then, how can this distortion create an experience of a five to ten second déjà vu sensation where we experience very clear and concise memory flashbacks to our present surroundings?

The human brain holds memories and information, but only from this lifetime on planet Earth. Remember you reside in a dimension created of billions of other galaxies with trillions and trillions of star systems. And don’t forget your spirit (consisting of mind and soul) that most historical religious figures, from Jesus to the Buddha, have discussed.  I don’t believe that your spirit is devoid of all knowledge and memory, otherwise there would be no point to the eternal life if you retained nothing.

The relationship between spirit and déjà vu

My theory is that déjà vu comes from the spirit. It is a result of premonitions prior and during life on planet Earth. Your brain, which operates like the memory and processor for the human body, latches on to these pre-witnessed events and attempts to process them.

You can focus on a normal or forgotten memory when you recollect it. However, when you try to focus on a déjà vu sensation you can’t. Simply put it is because it is not of this earth . . .  and neither, fundamentally, are you. Déjà vu comes from the spirit, not from the human brain, thus the memory functions of the brain do not apply.

The recent scientific research and other historical studies into the déjà vu phenomenon have my utmost respect. I firmly believe that as humanity on Earth moves forward into the 21st century we have to fully embrace science and all of its incredible findings — good or bad. However, in regards to déjà vu, I do not feel that science has the definitive answer to explaining this phenomena.

So, it’s up to you to brainstorm, debate, and discuss déjà vu until you come up with the answer that makes sense for you. And Soul’s Code is the perfect forum to do just that!

Radio show host and author of the Universal Learning Series, Sandy was born in the Scottish town of Paisley. Sandy’s previous article for Soul’s Code is Gut feelings guide us to our Soul’s Code.