Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Alex And Allyson Grey

Episode Date: April 20, 2016

Duncan visits Alex and Allyson at COSM and they talk about the birth of ENTHEON a mystical temple they are building to house great works of visionary art.  Go to buildentheon.com to help midwife this amazing place!   THANKS TO SQUARESPACE.COM for sponsoring this episode.  Go to squarespace.com and use offer code duncan to get 10% your first order.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello, my dear friends. It is I, Duncan Tressel, and you're listening to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast. No opening rant today. I'm picking pieces of my mind up off of my podcast studio floor because it just

got blown by the conversation I had with visionary artists Alex and Alison Gray. We're just going to dive right into this podcast, but first some very quick business. Today's episode of the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.com. Squarespace. These are the guys who make it so that you can create simple and easy websites without having to go through the horror of tracking down a web guy to make the thing for you. Now, you've heard me say this before, I'll say it again.

They're out there. They being great web designers in the same way that I'm pretty sure there's a big foot, they exist. And if you are patient and careful and believe in yourself, and if you find a mystical platypus or any kind of a hummingbird, a talking hummingbird, then they'll lead you to a web designer. But that's the only way you're going to find one generally. You're not going to find a great web designer by going on Craigslist.

By going on Craigslist, you're going to find the Grim Reaper wearing the costume of a web designer. Somebody who's going to take your dream of your big business or your blog or your podcast website and take your money and swirl those things together in a cauldron of pain and deliver to you a solidified hell anchor that will drag you down into the bottom of the digital underworld where you will languish in the world of souls who have been damned in this incarnation to have paid too much for a shitty website.

They say that when you die, you experience the way that you impacted every single person that you ever came in contact with. The life, when they say your life flashes before your eyes, it's not as though your life flashes before your eyes like you're watching a movie and you just sort of witness yourself every time you sneeze, every time you yelled at somebody in traffic or every time you fisted or were fisted. You experience the feeling of being fisted or fisting again and you experience the feeling of that which thou fisted.

You experience everything, the emotional state of all those of you came into contact with people you brushed into briefly in the airport when you were rushing to use the bathroom or somebody that you'd smirked at at a movie theater and you didn't even know you were smirking, you will feel the way that they felt. That means that if you create a shitty website, then you are generating such miserable karma for yourself because every, you will experience the mild sense of boredom and disinterest that every single person experienced when they went

parading through your low grade website that you got hoodwinked into paying for because you fell under the hypnotic, swirly eyed spell of a charlatan web designer. They're out there, friends, and I will make this confession. I've made it before. I'll make it again. I used to be one of them. That's right. I used to be a charlatan web designer.

I didn't even know I was a charlatan web designer. Just like all the greatest evil in the world, I thought I was doing good. I thought that I was offering people an actual service because I had spent a few brief days studying how to use HTML. I didn't even really know how to code. And I was at the time, this is when I was pretty broke and my credit was, my age and my credit were the same number. I was eating weird biscuits that I would buy at the dollar store or Korean

grocery stores. I was broke. My car almost got repossessed. And I thought that I could parlay my very, very weak understanding of how to design websites and do an actual business. And yeah, I did it. I did it a couple of times and I didn't do a good job. I think I thought I was doing an okay job at the time.

I think the rate that I was offering, I thought was a decent rate, but the rate that I was offering for my diarrhea style websites was 50 times higher than the amount that it costs for getting an incredible website over at squarespace.com. You don't have to study HTML anymore. You don't have to go to a Charlotte and web designer. You don't have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night with a meat hook swinging down into your neck because a disgruntled web designer is sick of you calling and asking to correct the atrocious errors that he made in the

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I don't, uh, promote, uh, products on this, uh, show that I haven't used. Uh, I also know the folks over at squarespace and they represent, uh, this glorious new version of business person that's emerging from the internet. Uh, and, and that's folks who actually seem to get a rush from giving people, uh, incredible stuff that disrupts markets, uh, for a small amount of money or relatively small amount of money. It's, I mean, it's $9 a month, not $8 a month, $8 a month. That is not a lot of dough, man.

Eight dollars a month. You could figure that out, especially if you're somebody who has the, uh, the dream of getting your stuff out there. You know, I always use the example of a friend of mine who sold her socks online. Uh, she would sell her stinky socks and she was, uh, uh, uh, an honorable business person in the sense that I actually told her, you know, why don't you start like a stinky sock form where you sort of hire your friends to wear socks so that you can produce more socks.

Cause she said that to produce one pair of sellable stinky socks, she would have to wear them for a couple of days. And, uh, you know, the amount that she was selling the socks for, based on the amount of time she was putting into generating the stink of the sock, it made it so that she was making well, well, well under minimum wage. And my recommendation to her was, you know, get, get a bunch of people to do this, start a stinky sock sweatshop, so to speak. You're going to make more socks and you're going to make more money.

And she said it wouldn't be fair because the guys who were buying her socks knew what she looked like. And, and you know, she was selling these socks as socks that actually came off her feet. So this was an honorable sock monger and the universe rewarded her. She made a ton of, she made a lot of money. I don't know, a ton of money. She's not like Bill Gates level money, but I think she did okay, uh, you know,

for, for what is essentially passive income? I mean, you, you're going to wear socks no matter what. So my point being, this is a woman who saw a demand in the market and filled that demand, and if she could do it, you can too. If you're somebody who wants a side business or has an idea of ways to, uh, to sell stuff online, you're going to need a website to do it. And if you want to stick your toe in the waters of having an online business, why would you start off by paying thousands and thousands and thousands and

thousands and thousands of dollars to a guy who's probably just going to punch his fist through the chest of your dreams, rip out your entrepreneurial heart and turn it into a bag of dusty Doritos that he munches on late at night. While he screams at this, whoever he's playing at Hearthstone, don't do it. Go to squarespace.com, enter in code Duncan. I had to look it up. That's the weird pause enter in code Duncan. You'll get 10% off your first purchase.

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I keep saying that, um, you can create incredible prank websites. So a lot of people seem to forget how easy it is to, uh, create, uh, uh, prank websites these days. You can really like in the old days, if you wanted to build a nice, if you wanted to create a great prank website, for example, a website claiming to, uh, I don't know, have proof of the aliens landed or a website that, uh, where you play the part of a, I don't know, like, uh, I don't know, a government agent or something who knows about aliens or whatever.

You had to like, it was troublesome. These days you could just go to squarespace.com, pay $8 a month and you can have your own version of info wars, your own version of whatever website that you want. It's all there for you. We live in beautiful, beautiful, incredibly advanced, super sophisticated, technologically bad ass times. And there's no reason for you to not stick your hand deep into the marsupial

pouch of the future and pluck out a sweet, brand new, baby, darling, adorable website where you can articulate your own truth to the digital world. Go to squarespace.com, use my name, Duncan, sign up, give it a shot. They support this podcast and they have been one of our longest running supporters. So if there is any reason that you've been thinking about building a website and you want to support this podcast, a great way to do it would be by going over to squarespace and signing up today. They're lovely people.

I've had many conversations on the phone with them and I have a soft spate, soft spate spot, soft spot in my heart for the folks over at Squarespace. Just like the soft spot they said babies have. That's something that always terrified me. When I was a kid around a baby, my mom would explain to me that babies have something called a soft spot and that if you touch them on the head wrong, like just touch their head in any kind, like just if you touch the wrong place of on top of their head, your finger will just push right through.

Like you're pushing through the crust on a chicken pot pie, like right into their brain. So I was always terrified of being around babies because I was afraid my finger would push into their brain. Squarespace.com, go there, use offer code Duncan, build a website, give it a shot. And by the way, all you web designers out there who are like gritting your, who get angry when I do these ads and seem like I'm denigrating web designers. I'm not denigrating web designers.

I'm just saying that you guys should get paid what you deserve to get paid. And a good web designer deserves to get paid a lot of money because you're going to spend many, many, many, many, many, many hours doing a very sophisticated thing that the majority of people on earth can't possibly do. That's what I'm saying. And that there's, it's a thing that can easily get faked by charlatans. So forgive me web designers. I don't mean to denigrate you.

I'm denigrating all those crooks and scoundrels out there who are luring people into the quicksand pit of horror that happens when you go down that bramble filled curvy road into the land of a mediocre website. Go to squarespace.com, code word Duncan, try them out today. Won't you? Uh, also a great way for you to support the Duncan, Trussell family. Our podcast is to go through our Amazon portal, which is located at Duncan, Trussell.com, uh, more and more of you seem to be using this portal.

And I'm very grateful to you for doing that because that's a, that is a big, uh, that is like a big revenue stream for this podcast. And I'm, I'm incredibly grateful to you. Those of you who, before you go to Amazon, go through our portal. It's a cool way to support the podcast cause Amazon gives us a small percentage of whatever you buy and it doesn't cost you anything, uh, more than the time that it takes to go to Duncan, Trussell.com and click through the portal. If you don't want to use Amazon, if somehow you, uh, are not aware of the

existence of Amazon, it's one of those things that will dramatically transform your life, uh, if you're, especially for somebody like me, an old, an old hunched over thin and hair dude, uh, who, who comes from an error where if you wanted to get, you know, toilet paper or sponges or anything like that, then you would get in your car and actually drive to a store, uh, where you would be surrounded by people, um, all in that kind of hypnotic consumerist trance that people tend to get into whenever they go to a place where plastic is being sold in mass.

It's also the same effect that happens when people are around a buffet. Uh, the next time you're at a buffet, practice some mindfulness and just watch the way that you feel and notice the way that people act when they are around food, that kind of animalistic thing deep in their slimy old reptile brain comes erupting out. And even though they aren't overtly aggressive, there can be a general sense of pushing and bustling towards the teeth of your sweet mother, uh, as though you're a puppy competing for that nectar only at a buffet.

Usually you're just in the embarrassing situation of waiting in line to get watery eggs from the sizzler Sunday brunch. Uh, you don't have to do that anymore. Amazon actually has a grocery service. They're not going to deliver you, you know, watery eggs, but they will deliver you eggs in the shell if you live in certain cities. And they've got a lot of other stuff there. So if you're, uh, sort of, if you've been putting off like buying toilet paper

and, um, maybe you've been using like, I don't know, I don't know what you would be using. I, if you're using, if you don't do that, get some toilet paper, man, you don't have to, you could just go, go to amazon.com and they'll have it to your house sometimes the next day, especially if you sign up for an Amazon plus membership. So click on our portal. If you want to support this show, another great way to support this podcast

is by checking out, uh, buying one of our shirts. We have these awesome mugs and a lot of other stuff at the shop. So, uh, go to the shop, go through our portal, go to square space. And finally, I would like to announce, uh, that I've got some dates coming up that I would like to see you guys at. Um, I'm going to be at the end of the month or mid end of the month on the 23rd, the 24th and 25th, I'm going to be in Texas on the 23rd. I'm going to be in Austin, Texas at the parish with Aubrey Marcus and

Danielli Bollelli. Uh, at the 24th, I'm going to be at the come and take it comedy takeover festival, uh, with Johnny Pemberton and Danielli Bollelli. I'm also going to be doing stand up at this is a comedy festival. I'll be doing stand up there too. You can see both shows if you want, uh, the link is on my website. And then on the 25th in Dallas, Texas, I'm going to be in the Sons of Herman Hall with Johnny Pemberton.

These are all live podcasts. Uh, so I'm going to be recording live podcasts, come to these shows, get your tickets in advance. The tickets are going very, very quickly for this. So don't put off getting tickets for these, but come, come hang out with me and, uh, folks who listen to the podcast. These are my favorite thing. This is basically one of my favorite things to do on planet earth, which is

to do these live podcasts and then hang out with everybody after the show. It's really, really fun and cool. And if you want to see what it looks like in person to, uh, for these podcasts to be recorded, it's a great way for you to do that. And also a great way for you to meet other people who listen to the show. Uh, there's also other dates coming up. I'm going to be, I'm going to just blow through these because I don't want to spend too much more time before this, this episode, but I'm going to

be in, uh, Winnipeg on the fourth, Minnesota on the fifth, Madison, Wisconsin on the sixth, Chicago on the seventh, Columbus on the eighth. These are all going to be live episodes of the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast. I'm also going to be, I don't have those dates in front of me, but I'm going to be, uh, on the East coast in April and here's a crazy, crazy special announcement, April 29th to May 4th. I am actually going to be a part of a Ram Dass retreat.

I will be doing live Duncan Trussell family hour podcast from the, uh, Ram Dass spring retreat, which is in Maui. So if you want to come to a Ram Dass retreat and, uh, as a, uh, listen to see a live podcast taping along with getting a chance to, uh, see Roshi, Joan Halifax and Ram Dass speak and do yoga and go snorkeling and, uh, drink my ties in between, uh, then this is, this is your chance. Come hang out with me, uh, April 29th to May 4th. I'm going to be in Maui at the Ram Dass spring retreat.

You can go to Ram Dass.org to find out more about how to get tickets to that event. All right, let's get on with this podcast. Today's guests, uh, all of you out there are probably aware of today's guests, Alex and Allison Gray. Uh, Alex and Allison Gray are visionary artists. They are the best way to describe them, or I don't know, there's probably a million better ways to describe them, but I'll give my shot at this. My own best way of describing them would be to say, uh, if you think of Terrence

McKenna, the philosopher, Terrence McKenna, if you've never somehow, if you've never heard of him immediately, YouTube Terrence McKenna, because there's a lot of great talks on the internet, Terrence McKenna was somebody who figured out how to go into that place that, uh, happens when you take mushrooms, DMT, or any kind of, uh, powerful plant medicine or psychedelic, uh, I like the term Alex Gray and Allison use, which is sacrament. Uh, he, you go to this place, uh, and you see the most incredible, amazing things that have the most of these amazing thoughts.

And then quite often when you're, when you come down, you find that you're just a stammering mess when it comes to describing whatever that place over there is Terrence McKenna was somebody who was like a pioneer who would journey into these places and then come back and in a very astute and verbose and accurate way could describe what's happening over there in that place. He could do, he did that with words. Allison Gray and Alex Gray, they do it visually. They do it with their painting.

You should immediately go over to AlexGray.com or AllisonGray.com to see what I'm talking about. Links will be at DuncanTruzzle.com. They're the real deal, man. That's just the only way I could explain it. There, there, there are people who have fearlessly gone swimming into, uh, waters that I would never can have the guts to go to. Well, maybe now after talking with them, I think I feel more inspired than I

felt, uh, in a long, long time. And I hope that, uh, this, uh, this conversation that we had helps to inspire you too. Before I forget, if you live in Los Angeles and you want to come and meet uh, Alex and Allison Gray, they're going to be, uh, at the Henry Fonda Theater. This Friday, that's Friday, January the 16th, it's seven PM. They're going to be doing live painting. So if you're somebody like me who has spent years and years gawking over the incredible art that these two do, here's a chance for you to watch the art

actually using out of them into this dimension at the Henry Fonda theaters. Theater. Why did I say theaters? The Henry Fonda Theater. There's also some great music with random rap, uh, and a lot of other great DJs are going to be there. Doors are at seven, tickets are only 35 bucks. Come, uh, come and hang out.

I'm going to go to this event. Let's all hang out at this event. Duncan Trussell family hour, Los Angeles dwellers, I summon you. Let's gather together this Friday, January 16th at the, uh, Fonda Theater. That's at six, one, two, six Hollywood Boulevard and just listen to great music and watch these two geniuses paint. That sounds like a great night to me. So without further ado, if everyone out there could at this moment, please

open up your every single chakra in your body, send your astral body in the direction of these two luminous beings. And here's what's really cool about sending your astral body in the direction of these two sweeties, the odds are really good. You're going to end up in one of their paintings because they're just going to channel you into their work. So, and I really mean that after hanging out with them, I really mean that. These guys are the real deal.

Please now explode your spiritual heart, flower petals all over these, uh, two sweet, incredible human beings and welcome to the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast, Alex and Allison Gray. Thank you so much for coming to the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast. This is a gigantic moment for me. It's so nice to be in the same room with you too. It's another great to be here. Great to be here.

I just want to dive right into it. Uh, as I've been, as the interview has been approaching, I've been thinking a lot about your art and reading many interviews that you two have done and writings, uh, on your blog. Uh, and so the question that I'd like to start off with is both of you, uh, are considered visionary artists and you say that your art comes from visions. My question is, what are you looking at when you have the visions that inspire your art?

For myself, the most intense visions have been through psychedelics and have been on LSD or psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, DMT, same thing. But basically, uh, that area of the psychedelics and, uh, so it's not that they haven't occurred, um, in other contexts, the, uh, the nature of mind painting, for instance, was based on a experience after reading self-liberation through seeing with naked awareness, which is a fantastic translation of a text by Padmasambhava, um, translated by John Reynolds. And, um, it's extraordinary introduction to your own primordial nature by the

master himself and the master being Padmasambhava, who is really only a conduit to the transcendental Dharmakaya. That's, you know, through a few, uh, iterations, I guess you got to go to Vajrasattva first, but then, uh, he's a pretty clear channel to the top. So Vajrasattva was one of his teachers or Vajrasattva is a Sambhogakaya or visionary Buddha. Gotcha. Um, and so he's from the realm of glorious richness, which is the visionary realm.

Okay. So the, this visionary realm is a realm that is always interacting with us, is, uh, present when we dream. Uh, it is, uh, what we look at when we dream, you're looking at the imagination. But the truth is that you're only always looking at the imagination. Your entire experience of reality is a figment of your imagination. That's what neuroscientists say, not just artists. All right.

So the fabrication of the divine imagination is what we are experiencing. We think it's hard. It's reality. It's the material world. Yes. Yes. And we are measuring it and we have science. We can agree about certain things about the characteristics of the material world,

but we all go to sleep at night and we don't really understand that we disappear a self somehow no longer exists from what we imagine it to be. And, uh, we have other experiences of the imagination, which we would rather not recall because they somehow disturb our sense of solidity on our understanding of reality. It's all very clear, isn't it? Yeah. You know, so, uh, it's a, uh, what we're visioning is, uh, the divine mystery

itself, both inner and outer worlds, and they're both infinite. And that's the revelation that we get when we have, uh, inner visions, as we get a glimpse rumble, we get, uh, the, um, experience of, uh, a inner cosmos that is just as infinite, unimaginably infinite and dense in dimensions as the outer world reality, how it could be. None of us can understand. That's right. I don't understand it, but I'm very interested in.

There, uh, in my mind, there's a couple of people, three people that come to mind as being the, uh, most expert at articulating what happens when you go into that psychedelic place. Terrence McKenna verbally was the master of describing that place. And you two visually, uh, somehow are taking pictures of this place that when you talk about the inner cosmos, I think of subjectivity. I think of dreaming like I will dream something and someone else in the same room will dream a completely different thing.

But when I take a psychedelic, uh, specifically DMT, sometimes mushrooms, there seems to be a kind of shared experience of this place that, that both of you are charting. And so I am curious about that because it seems to be a real place. It seems to be not just a subjective. When I think of imagination, I think subjectivity, this seems more like going to the homolias or something. It seems to be a, not that the, do you know, so what is that?

Or is that God? Are you guys, okay. Well, we decide to give it the name God. You know, God is a name that's a, it's an agreed upon name for that space in which you have that experience. God, for me, I come from the Jewish persuasion. I, um, I never thought of God as having a face or having a body or being embodied really, uh, cause it was just, I think it's DNA or something.

Cause when it came to doing, to portraying the sacred, it came to me as abstract. So anyway, and for Alex, it came to Alex as the one, which I think is extremely like the Christian story is about the one, the one that's born and teaches and heals and dies and rises one. I think this is what's so fabulous about YouTube being, uh, partners, um, is that you seem to be the yin, yang, you, you're grabbing the personified, the personification of this. And you, you always seem to be articulating the, uh, oh gosh, what's it called?

I remember the Hare Christians called it the, um, Brahma Jyoti. Have you ever heard the term the Brahma Jyoti, the impersonal or that radiates out of the planet that Krishna lives on called Goloka Vrindavan. That's so potent that it, uh, has as its primary quality, uh, expansive, uh, in formlessness yet you, your painting obviously has form, but your painting is personified. So you've got these two beautiful, uh, you've got the Bhakti, uh, mixed in with the, uh, Buddhist, uh, dissolution of self and expansiveness.

And it pairs so well together. Um, one thing that I found out studying you too, I had no, when I've seen your art and I've seen the incredible lettering in it, and I've thought to myself, that lettering, I've seen that lettering. I know that lettering. That's the lettering. I hear that a lot. And I just, how book, uh, just came out with my forward.

I was so honored, uh, to be forwarded in the book, psychedelics and language. There are enough people who have seen language in psychedelics that there is a PhD thesis, basically, but it was no linguistics. She called it. What's it called? Wow. So I got to write the four and I was very, very proud. And it just came out just this like past week.

So Diana, Diana Slattery, she's one of our tribal leaders. I mean, she's, you know, she's an elder of the tribe and, and really practiced in a brilliant, brilliant writer. But I don't think people realize that that, that is, that is you. I don't, I don't, I never, I thought that Alex, I thought you had painted the whole thing, but when you realized like, Oh my God, you two are fused together in this way. And the, and also, um, that you two apparently share visions together when that, that inspire these paintings.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that's like, uh, working together in the same studio as artists living in the same house together as partners, having children together, running a business together, while simultaneously being conduits for this divine energy. How do you pull it off? It's like a dual monastic practice, I think, except there's two of you. You know, monastic, you always live separately, but we are, you know, constantly.

Well, I think that when we started the, um, relationship, we, we bonded over certain things and, uh, it was really our, our connection via the, um, medicine and our agreement that our relationship would be a transformative relationship that we were on a transformative path together that we, none of us could really tell where we would go. We were in our early twenties. On LSD in an apartment in New York. Is that right?

Well, actually, um, we met in art school. Oh, I see. But this is when you guys really started. No, no, no. We, we met because we were in a conceptual art class together. Gotcha. And so then Alex's art and mine, I think to him, uh, became very interesting and we were, you know, kind of interested in each other's work first without really

thinking of each other as potential anything. And then Alex did LSD for the first time in my apartment at a party for the end of the year. It was like the last day of school. It was a Friday night and he, uh, took LSD for the first time. What kind of a facet was it? Very good. And powerful.

They had names, you know what I mean? It was 1974, 74. It was like purple microduck, you know, um, might have been purple, might have been, and it was dissolved in Kalua and given to us by an inspiring teacher who, um, was friends with both of us. And, uh, and I was so desperate and suicidal at the time that, um, but you know, LSD, which I was scared to take previously with my, uh, friends. Cause I was so depressed here.

He was, he just came back from a trip to the North magnetic pole when I heard that he had just gone to the North magnetic pole. I was, you know, cause I had already been blown away a couple of times by a couple of really amazingly deep and, you know, raw pieces, you know, that he would do like he did, he vomited on camera. You know, and that really impressed me as a bulimic. You know, I, I was like, whoa, you did that in front of everybody. So I got really paid attention there, but I was not thinking of going out with him.

He was like, you know, it was not, he was a student. He was weird, right? Ever shaved off half of his hair. He had like this one half was all along and the other was bald. And he went around like that. And I said, Alex, why did you do that? Why did you do that? Well, I was, uh, it was a vision.

I mean, now we talk about the idiosyncrasy of, of dream visions, but it was a dream vision. I opened up a trash can and saw myself inside of there. Like, but I was conscious and I was looking up at myself and I was sort of like both people at the same time seeing each other, but the person in the trash can had a half hair. Wow. And, and so I had made like eye contact with it. And ever after when I was looking in the mirror, all I could see was half of the

hair gone, you know, it's like, Oh my God, this, what the fuck was that? And, uh, then you were feeding you that obsession. You just couldn't get it off your mind. You did all these. Alex did a billboard because he was a billboard painter. So he did this billboard of himself like that. And then he did other pieces with his hair, you know, like, out, you know, like subway, you know, like subway signs and things like this.

He did a whole campaign of himself. It's the courage. What's so inspiring to me about, uh, what you guys are doing is the courage behind it, the courage to follow those impulses. You, this is like, to me, uh, this is biblical level courage. And it's so funny that in visions, you always get in mythology. You, the hero is always given a vision of something nuts, something crazy, impossible, beyond impossible.

Moses, you have to go back and free all the slaves. You got a family, you're all here and you're like, you're hiding out here. Bush is burning. Go back there and free the slaves. A Bush is talking to you. A Bush, you tell that to your friends. Go tell your friends that a Bush told you to go free the slaves from Egypt. It's over, man.

No, no, they would just know that you had taken some acid and then they would completely understand. He's, he's been standing next to the Acacia tree, listen to him. He's, he's sucking in the DMT patients. Well, yeah, that, I mean, but even so, even if you have the excuse or the, the, you could say, yes, I took a very powerful psychedelic and in the psychedelic trance, a Bush told me to go free the slaves. Still, majority of friends in, for most people, fans, friends and family,

or they are going to sit you down and be like, listen, you got to slow down, brother. Well, yeah, you know, it has, it hasn't been like, you can't tell everybody. No, no, you can't tell anybody. That's it. You just do what it tells you to do. And then, and then if there are results, the rest is history. Wow.

But you just said, if it's good, if it's good, because, you know, you know, hear about stories of people hearing voices, telling them to do bad things. So of course, you know, you have to believe in your inner judge. And I think that's God. You just listened for the voice. Is it saying good? Is it saying bad? If it says bad, don't go.

If it says good, go. And I, you know, I, I don't know. I, that's a murky area for me. Yes. How do I discern, how do I discern my own fear of change from impulsiveness, let's say, yes, or like people that change all the time? You know, it's just told me, I just, I heard it in my head. Because there's a certain, you know, commitment is like, it's such a great thing.

You know, when you commit to something, you, you grow. It's like, you know, like things that plant grow, you know, you plant the roots and you grow, you commit to something. And every time you commit to something, but then you, you can't, you know, then they say, you know, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Whoa. So there's that other side you cannot be, you know, you don't want to be a hobgoblin of little minds.

That's right. Consistency. You know, break out, take a risk, you know. Yeah. So it's just this voice that you keep listening to, which way to go. Yeah, I, it's that, to me, that's always one of the trickiest. That's one of the tricky, tricky areas. And I love that you're talking about commitment.

For example, I was in one of your interviews, you were talking about being on, I believe it was MDMA and a swimming pool and having the vision for, I think it was an installation that you did in London. Oh yeah, we were in Bali. Yeah. Yeah. And we were in Bali, we were swimming and we were doing all kinds of things. We were recovering from a severe injury as well.

That's right. That's right. What was the injury? We had a horrible car accident about four, between four and five years ago. But we are better, baby. We are better. I mean, the prayers, let me tell you, if you really want to heal, let me just give you the thing, the low down really quick.

Cause I, who knows if we'll ever get to tell all these people, you want to heal? Start thinking about the gift that that, whatever that malady or illness is, you've got to find it, figure it out. What is it trying to teach you? Anyway, we were very lucky. We didn't lose our limbs and we didn't lose our mobility. So we knew that we could heal. I mean, I knew that if I could move, I was going to be okay.

Right. So I was very lucky. Some people aren't that lucky and I don't mean to tell them, but because I only know my experience. But anyway, started thinking right away about the gift. What are we supposed to be learning from this? The prayers were pouring in and we listened to people. But we listened to our inner mind most.

So if the doctors told us we had to have our casts on for 10 months, but a dancer who had a similar accident said, get those things off of there. So we kept them on for about 10 weeks. And then we found ourselves in Bali in a pool. And that's where we had that vision of the monocard. The monocord, which could you describe what the monocord is? Cause I'd never heard that before this interview. Well, it's an old alchemical idea.

You can see it in some of Robert Flood's engravings from the 1600s. But basically there's a string that goes from heaven to earth. And we are that string and God tunes it. That is so beautiful. This is, brings up at the, you know, the Ram Dass people when they talk about how if you ever find yourself meditating, if you ever find yourself sitting still and just breathing, they call that grace, they say, you have been given that. It's not as though you willed that into being.

It's that you have been given that moment of meditating. And I love that because it kind of alleviates the guilt of not meditating or that we're feeling like, I know I should be sitting more, doing more spiritual practice when you, when you imagine like just if you're patient, God will start tuning your cord in just the right way. And you don't have to force it. Well, you know, if you ever are feeling guilty about not meditating, I would just say meditate right there and then take it.

Don't, don't sit down. Don't stop doing whatever you're doing. Everything is a meditation. Washing dishes or a meditation, walking upstairs or a meditation, going to the bathroom as a meditation, meditate, you know, because there are very strongly held in traditional, ancient, traditional, uh, uh, customs in which, um, everyday life is a meditation, the Zogchen Buddhist, uh, practice is to live meditation in all of the things that you do.

So the moments that you're feeling, Oh God, you know, sitting more, it's not, I'm not saying don't sit. I love sitting. I think sitting is great. But if you ever feeling like, you know, you didn't, then just do, just start noticing everything around you and being really present in the moment. It's, it's very fun and easy and enriching to do that at any moment, just to kind of bring that in.

I kind of think of that as, um, using the idea of art as, uh, you know, your basis for your meditation, that you're gazing on the spectacle of creation that is laid before you and you had, you know, although you completely create with your imagination at the same time, you hadn't hardly anything to do with the creation of the external world, which you are privileged to be the witness of through your little meat jacket. You get the lens, the meat lens, you know, into this dimension. How lucky, you know, each a little separate God self in a meat wrapper.

You know, for a sausage of time, it's all a bun in a bun. It's, it's the way God loves to do it. I'll have one with everything. Exactly. That cosmic hot dog. May I ask you who's looking through the meat lens? It's like, yeah, it's, it's God itself. It's the, you know, the, uh, to please one self and to know one self is to know Allah.

That's what the Quran says. So to know one self, one self. Can you please say that again? To know one self is to know Allah. That is Muhammad. But before that, you said to please, to please ones to. Well, I'm thinking Christopher Alexander, different guy, not Muhammad. Okay.

God bless the prophet. The Christopher Alexander said that a principle of aesthetics really for the artist is to please one self. Oh, now to please one self, I see very similar to the statement about Allah. Wow. And so you're hard on yourself. You don't do it easy. You have to keep evolving, keep bootstrapping yourself, keep making it better.

That is the erotic and, uh, impulse toward life and toward betterment because life means getting better, getting richer, getting more informed, getting, uh, more understanding, greater understanding, greater love, you know, more ability to, to give of the gifts of your soul, you know, to condition the meat lens so that you can deliver what the soul wants you to gift into the world. Oh, right. Yeah. Why, why, why do we resist that?

Why is there such resistance to that process? We don't. We don't. I think we do it. I think you do it. I think doing this podcast, you don't have to do this. You do this and you give it to everyone and you make it better all the time. We were just talking about you improve it and you hone it.

This is your creative life and it's your spiritual life and it's your gift to the world. We do do it and people do it in all different ways. People garden, people make their homes beautiful. People who aren't doing that are feeling lonely. They're feeling depressed. That's the answer to feeling lonely and depressed. Make something and give it to others. Anything.

Be something beautiful. Give beauty. What if you think you can't make something beautiful? Well, how about make something authentic? I shouldn't just say beauty in the sense of it's got to be pretty or something because somebody could do a painting of absolute desperation and it would resonate with somebody and possibly they would feel like they were connecting in some way.

There's beauty in that. There's beauty in that and I think authentic is the way to go. What is authentic? Authentic is no pretending. Stop pretending. Without pretending, what's true? So you say, well, I've been pretending blah, but really blah. And then you just see what that is and then you just reveal it.

Just reveal it. So it's almost like a confession or something. Well, you can. You can make art out of that. It's a really great way to make the subjective objective. Something in your head out there and then you look at it and observe it and turn it all different ways and go, hmm, maybe, hmm. And then you get a different perspective on it.

It's a little bit outside of yourself. This brings me to something I wanted to talk with you guys about. Making this objective objective is a really cool way of saying what I was trying to figure out a way to articulate with what you are doing, which it's like you're a tube of interdimensional toothpaste that is being squeezed into this dimension from out there. And you're really doing it. Kinds dimensional soul goo.

That goo is coming out in the form of the Chapel of Sacred Meers. I've seen the drawings for what it's to look like. And I don't know how far along you are in the construction of the thing, but when I see that, when I, when I set eyes on that, I thought, my God, they're doing it. That thing McKenna wanted to do to go into the DMT realm, snatch an object from in there and bring it back into this dimension. Because he thought that if he brought it back here,

it would create a kind of shock wave that would transform this dimension, upgrade this dimension, do what you're saying to do personally to the entire realm that we are existing in right now. You guys are doing that and that takes guts, man. Who can, how can we have this kind of courage? How can I be more better at grabbing nuggets from out there into this realm? And how can the people who are listening, who maybe don't take psychedelics or don't have an interest in tripping out,

how can they grab those nuggets and bring it back? How do they bring the goo back into this realm? Well, I just wanted to say that you, you take on something that you can give away, take on a project that's bigger than yourself. In a way, you don't even know how you're going to get there. You're not sure, but that's really where you'd like to be. Like you kind of create an image out there in your future that would be like incredible, that you would really love to have.

And then you kind of craft everything around it so that you're always moving in that direction no matter how windy the path. You know, kind of keep that as a center of focus. But it's something that you have to give away. Because if it, you know, it has to be something, a gift. And as you're going on that way, I really, I think we both really recommend always giving away all the credit

for it happening to the divine. Make sure that the credit goes to the divine and you will always be surprised and you will always have miracles happening. That's, yes. I know what you're saying for sure. Isn't that always kind of a dismaying thing when some, you hear when an artist seems to be puffed up over the thing

that they're doing? Because the feeling is always one of like, man, not. Well, you got to be authentic. Like stop pretending. Like, you know, what is true? What's real? You know, like we are on our way closer than we've ever been to having a temple, a visionary art, a sanctuary home

for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. We are closer than we've ever been. So where are we? cement blocks around a carriage house, an 1882 carriage house. We are actually got the first floor of, you know, kind of, like hemmed in, you know, with all of, you know, and we're going for it. Now it's really, really freezing in New York.

So we're slowing down a little bit while we work on some other stuff on the property, but it's a 40 acre retreat center with six buildings and a barn. And so there's a lot to do there always. Can you talk a little bit about the specifically what the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is for people who maybe have no idea what this is? Because I just skipped right over what it is.

A lot of people. Sure. We also call it COSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. And Sacred Mirrors are a series of 21 paintings that I did over about a 10 year period. It was inspired by something that Allison said after we did a performance together called Life Energy back in 1978. And she thought that the charts that I had made,

where people stood in front of various systems of their body, one the nervous system, and the other one was the life energy system as defined in Eastern mysticism and acupuncture meridians and points and chakras and then some auras and things like that. So basically the light body as defined by clairvoyance and theosophists and folks like that. I had kind of cobbled together a lot of different maps that I

was then aware of, of the kind of light body. Just to give a contrast to what is the nature of consciousness and life energy? Where are we looking at just the brain and at the nervous system? Are we simply looking at these light body phenomena? So consciousness is somewhere in between and meditating on those things, standing in front of that, trying to feel those systems inside of your body was something that people did.

And they just would stand in front of it and they actually were participating in this kind of strange, from an art world perspective, because usually an art object is something that you're not really identified with explicitly, but you're observing and thinking about maybe art historically or all kinds of different ways. So to invite a viewer to instead of just looking at an art object on a wall like that, put it in a historical context to

identify with it, to mirror it. And she thought that an entire display of mind, body, and spirit, that kind of thing of chart-like encounters would be a great kind of thing for people. And based on people's, you know, connection with those charts, I agreed wholeheartedly and I felt doomed though, because I knew that to do it well, you would want to, you know, do every system of the body, you would want to do

all the races, and you would want to then do the light bodies, but in all of their detail and then go into the divine archetypes. So this was a lot, but over the next 10 years it happened. It was a 10-year project. He did it while he was doing many other things. He also was, he was also doing performances, and we were doing them together, and he was working at Harvard.

He was working for himself as a medical illustrator. So he was, but he got the jobs as a medical illustrator because of these paintings, which supported us for 12 years, but the paintings were seen by people at Harvard where he was working, and he started, they started hiring him, and he started a whole sort of enterprise that we worked together on for years. But anyway, he stopped doing medical illustration when he was about 45, I guess.

Yeah, and the Sacred Mirrors, she named them as well. So she inspired them and named the Sacred Mirrors, and so the Sacred Mirrors became the nucleus that it also embraced. It basically took the viewer to the point of the universal mind lattice, which is this recounting visually of an experience that Allison and I both share back in June 3, 1976, and where we melted down into our toroidal balls of light, kind of fountains and drains of light, intersecting an infinite omni-directional grid of similar light

balls. Every other soul, every other being, it seemed, was one of these nodes in this infinite network, and the light that was going through us was the light of love. Oh, cool. It was, everybody was made at the same light. Sounds like the web of Indra, have you heard that? Well, yes.

That's, yes. Well, I have a, probably my most reproduced work is called the Jewelnet of Indra, and Jewelnet of Indra refers to the Hindu story of the god Indra, the god of space and time, who has a net that expands and stretches in every direction infinitely. And at every crossing of the net, there's a jewel that's so highly polished that it interreflects all the other jewels in the net. And that is the story of the Jewelnet of Indra, and I named a double,

it's like a diptych. It's a huge piece, and it'll be in the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. It's one of our, you know, collection. We've kept pieces over the years. I wanted to give you my perspective on what Cosm is, and that is that there's three bodies of work that we have between us. We share a studio for 40 years, like you said, and we have three bodies of work. There's Alex's paintings, but this is between us.

I always feel like Alex's paintings are my paintings, too, because we always collaborate on everything. She inspired him, you know. Well, he, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing at all or ever, if it weren't for Alex's influence. My work changed dynamically when I started sharing a studio with Alex. But in any case, there's Alex's art, and there's my art, and then there's Cosm. And Cosm is our social sculpture that we share with a community of artists and creative people

that has been, the first permutation of it was in our home in Brooklyn. We have a big loft and park slope, and we had this, you know, people were coming for full moon ceremonies every month, and that was our one event a month. It was like a big open studio. We did it every month, and it was just packed. It was so packed. 2003. 2003.

We did a year and a quarter's worth there. We actually did about a year's worth. Were these like parties or rails? They were, the ceremonies start like a variety show. It started with just 10 or 15 of us getting together, and everybody would contribute like music, poem, a little wisdom bite, a little more music. It was started inspired by Shaman, who was our friend Alex Stark, and he was part of the prayer committee of the chapel.

And so he with some friends felt like it was important. It was important. And say that we had a vision of building a chapel in 1985 when we were doing MDMA for the first time, and it was still legal, and it was a legal therapeutic dose of MDMA. But we did it on our bed, and we both came out of it with visions of building this circular space for the sacred mirrors, which Alex had spent 10 years painting.

And I just, just to throw it in there. The catalyst had been MDMA offered to us by the man who was buying the sacred mirrors. We had already agreed to sell them. Like what's going to happen to these pieces? You know, these are like an important, we want to share these with people. It was our desire. Was he pissed? No, no, it was perfect because his daughter became our dearest friend

and helper over the years. That's amazing. I mean, there's got to be a little part of him that's like... He died soon thereafter, and I think he kind of knew that it was a big thing to take on. But we decided before that... I'm sorry, a burden to have such powerful things. Well, it was very weird because he admitted that he was only that interested in a few of the sacred mirrors.

And I would say that it's the kind of the crux of the sacred mirrors, the energy bodies, the light bodies. They're the real distinguished center. And even those, you can't count on them being on view for anyone, but his personal friends in some home that, you know... Yeah, nobody wants to have the Ark of the Covenant in their living room. It's going to blast, or it's going to maybe want it. You're going to get overcooked.

Put it in the bunker. Cold storage. But I know that that sounds so overblown and weird, but honestly, I mean, let me be the one to say it. You guys are what... We have different words for you now, but a long time ago, you'd say, oh, they're prophets. That's what they are.

They're seeing visions. They're having visions of a divine being that reminds us of what we have all experienced, but haven't figured out how to say or to show. They've had the courage to bring those visions back into this world with the intention of beautifying the dimension that they're existing in. How is that any different than any story of... It's the exact same thing. I just like to say that Alex's work has become a context for the experience

of a lot of people of having contact with the divine. So they have contact with the divine. A lot of times, somebody will open the book for them when they're on their first trip or something. This has become kind of a thing. And people look at Alex's work through that lens. So I think that his work has become a context. And so therefore, it's almost public.

There's so many of us that have had that experience and are looking for that vision, and they're satisfied, at least in part, by Alex's work and the visionary art tribe that we also are supporting. I mean, at Cosm, the first thing that you're going to walk into is the Narthex Gallery, which is going to be the gallery of exquisite originals by the visionary tribe. The best visionary artists working today. And some of our friends, of course, have already passed.

So his work is very valued. And they've kept their work like Alex did. They knew it was important because it represented visions that other people really identified with. And they felt that they should share it and put it in a place where people could come and see it. Like Van Gogh's Starry Night. I'm so glad it's at the moment.

You can walk in any time. So anyway, that's what we are also creating is a place for the... The best visionary art will be on view long-term in a rotating manner so that we can pull things out annually or something like that. But basically, there'll be long-term exhibits of the best originals because people aren't even showing their originals. They're hiding in the studio sometimes because nobody wants to sell them. And maybe they go to a museum from time to time.

Well, there are a lot of sales and sales to be and things like that. But there are some artists like that that have kept some real jewels that could be exhibited for a long period, over a year perhaps. And so we'll do annual shows of the visionary tribe and also have a little kind of a store down in that area that'll allow reproductions to be available as well. And so it'll be a context for the visionary art tribe, which I think not all of them at all,

but many of whom have been sacramentally inspired. Because I think it's really natural that the more millions of people who meditate, who do yoga, who are tuning in to their inner dimension spiritually, and people who take sacrament in one way or another, they have a taste of the visionary dimension. And so they have a connection with the work. And so as you say, it's been the kind of way of sacred art over the centuries.

And building sacred space is the work of a community. That's why they started the full moon ceremonies. And so we opened it up then to the internet. From our little circle, our prayer committee, we said, you know, I mean, what we're doing here, we're all just talking about wanting to create this chapel and really wanting to empower the creative lives of each one of us. That's what we really want to do.

We want to gather together and have that be the transdimensional love goo that binds us, that we acknowledge to be true, and that we can be creative. See, like, creativity is evolution in our hands. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, I see that. Well, I also wanted to say about our community is that, you know, we were talking before about changing the world, and there's a lot of bad out there, and none of us are unaware. And how can we make a difference? How can we really make a difference?

Well, we are pretty, our tribe of psychedelically inspired, creative, intelligent, stylistic, interesting people that are getting healthier, that are getting wealthier, that are getting, you know, we are creating infrastructure and power structures. And, you know, the Duncan Tressel family hour is one of them. I mean, to have networks of our own where we bring our own out to the public and like sort of brok it off these broccoli, you know, kind of interest to our community. And then we have these festivals and then we have these,

of course, we have our program coming up on Friday night at the Henry Fonda Theater, you know, where we have fabulous music, beautiful people and interesting, great dancing, and Alex and I and Amanda Sage and other friends, I'll be painting, you know, and please do come and bring friends. Sure. We want to see everybody there at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. Are we excited and proud to be here? But I just feel like we are creating as a tribe worldwide. We've been to Moscow, you know, we've been and they ask us how is the chapel doing?

But it's a context. Because we all want it to exist because we recognize what it is. I know what it is. Because you guys have, see the difference between you and a lot of people is a lot of people are, the phone is, they're getting the phone call and hearing the instruction, but they're not doing it. They just like, don't call here again. What are you talking about?

I'm not building a temple. Bye. It's nuts, man. But you'd be amazed how many people want to build a temple. When you're building a temple, you hear about it a lot, I'll tell you. It's happening a lot. Not everybody is supposed to build a temple. Temples are centers, though, and they're centers of power.

And you could have one in your own home on your bureau. It's a little called a little altar and everyone should, you know, focus their positive energy on it, put a little candle on there, throw a few. Chris, I don't know. I, I guess it sounds woo-woo, but I love it to have a place of power. Not woo-woo. Acknowledge a sacred space. It's a node.

Just get the, just play with the idea that it is possible that you could create a node in the place that you live through which this goo that we're talking about could maybe- Sluice is through. Sluice is through. I like sluice. That's right. Because that-

The portal. The portal. Yeah. Don't call it an altar. Call it a portal. It sounds better. And because all these words are screwy now, like when you hear temple, you know, when people hear temple, they're going to think-

Button press. I like pressing buttons. I think that's very important because, you know, you don't want the fundamentalist to get away with having all that, you know, those words and terminologies. Only they should have them. Control, religion. Yeah. Uh-uh.

No. God doesn't belong to the fundamentalists alone. But this gets me to what, you know, and forgive me. I am woo-woo. I am woo-woo. And forgive me that I keep pressing in this direction. But it feels like one thing that I have thought and some of my friends, and we've talked about this, how it doesn't seem fair that they got to start a religion.

It doesn't seem fair that the big world religions, that's it. Muhammad seal the prophets. Good night. I'm out of here. That's it. It doesn't seem fair. And so, uh, and the other thing that seems a little problematic with, um, some of the literal interpretations of the scriptures, the great world religions are based on,

is that the symbol structures they're using are based on a completely different environment than the one that we're living in right now. So it's hard to probably get the same visceral connection that you would get if you were living in the desert and somebody came to you and, uh, a prophet said the things that the prophets were saying back then, uh, you probably had a more visceral connection to it. Whereas now when you hear those words, they seem old and musty and kind of, they just don't resonate. Whereas there, so we need to encapsulate that energy in a whole new symbol structure.

And, um, whatever that is, I mean, religion is another word like temple. It's like, ah, blah, I don't like religion. Religion is bullshit. But it's, it feels like you, you guys are kind of part of that, that emerging new. Look at what the Nazis did to the swastika. Swastika did not mean what it meant. And then the Nazis took it and then it had this like, you can't even, I made a, I made a painting in the shape of a swastika.

And it was like, our gallerist would not even put it up. It was just, he was really having trouble with it. So, but anyway, what, what, we would not let the fundamentalists do that to these words and these, these names and these, they're only words. Words are symbols, symbols. That's why my work is all about symbols. It's what we make. Symbols are what we make as, as, as humans.

Let's imagine if religion was actually a bell curve and of human consciousness evolution. And it encapsulated the entire bell curve that there, you know, that there was a, a, a super conscious mystic edge of religion. And there was a kind of dogmatic, um, rule oriented and, um, deeply deluded, even shadowy, uh, spectrum where, uh, where people are powers, the, uh, the good that's being done. Let's just say, but I don't know that any religion is really like that. Do you think they are?

Well, I think that misguided people may lead people, other people astray. And until you have a contact with the positive love energy that is, uh, the real God, I think that, uh, you know, anything that comes from a center of hateful or destructive, uh, forces, one should really, uh, examine it right deeply and, and try to understand where the intentions are coming from, whether there is an actual contact with a divine field. And is it in congruence and alignment with what we would think would be the most positive and, uh, uh, health, uh, full, uh, reverencing of life outcome. You know, because that's a Schweitzer said was the real key to universal ethics is reverence

for life. Now, uh, any destruction of life has to be deeply considered. He, as a doctor, even considered the bacteria that he had to wind up killing. He was deeply considering all of the, uh, elements and the, and the strong conditions that we have, uh, and life feeds on life, but how can we reduce the suffering? How can we bring more health and more consciousness to our actions? So that is in alignment with what I believe is the truly divine message, the universal yes of Godhood, you know, the, the one self that we all share, the network self that we

tap into sometimes when we take the sacrament, get a glimpse of the universal realm, a heaven world. If it were, we lost our vertical dimension in the West. We have a flat materialist orientation where we're horizontally fixated on material reality and acquisition to the destruction of the planet. And this is not unknown to any of those destroyers. Now, it's only the unconscious end of our own psychic bell curve, you know, as much as we can leave behind and not acknowledge and things like that. But I think that the word religion in its primary source means contact with the divine connection with God, whatever you name it, you can use a different name. You can say primordial reality, ultimate reality, the force,

I just say the force because I'm Jewish and it's like it didn't, it doesn't have a face. It's, and it never did. I mean, when I saw it, it had lines of force. It had light. It was like the light coming out of a fountain and also being sucked into a fountain. And it was like the universal mind lattice, except a vista of them and they're all interconnecting. They're all blending. They're made of multicolors, you know, and that's, that's it. It's not, you know, it's a love engine. If you listen, you can hear what the engine tells you. The universal mind lattice. Is that like the flower of life? Is that what you're talking about? The universal mind lattice. Try to find somebody who called something. It was Alex's painting in

1988 or 81. And it was an original term and now it's become like part of the lexicon, I think. But in any case, universal mind lattice. Did you know that anybody used that before? I don't know. Did you hear it? I've never heard it, but I, it's not far off of a lot of descriptions of the Buddhic and theosophic kind of planes that there is a web or a lattice work of beings, the whole Diamond Sutra. And the Diamond Sutra, I'm sorry, that's Tantra. That's Tantric Buddhism? Well, there's a kind, yes, and a kind of Vajrayana visionary Buddhism that the, is specifically related to a kind of, it's like if you could turn the dial of the radio of dimensions of reality and receive different

transmissions, that there is a Dharma transmission station that you could tap into and tune into. And that Buddhas are actually in every, sharing every dimension of space, every part of reality is completely immersed and suffused in Buddhic love light. And that it could be part of the substructure of spiritual substructure of reality, that if one awakens to a conscious web of interconnected love energy, that it is the web of being that we all kind of draw from. But to think that we are not that timeless energy instead of this meat jacket is going to cause a lot of anxiety, you know. Damn right. It does. It is the source of all anxiety. Isn't that considered the primary delusion,

is the identification with the meat jacket? I think so. And yet it's unavoidable in the egoic vehicle that we ride through reality with. And so other people are going to mostly identify with that. You, you pierce it when you say something like namaste or, or try to think about another person as a sacred mirror. Well, that's because, you know, the source of, of, of pain and suffering and, and ugliness is the point of view that you're looking out the window of the portal of pain and suffering and ugliness. It's like it's out there. And so you're looking at that window and you're seeing everything as pain and suffering and ugliness. And all around you are other people who at that moment are also looking at pain and suffering and ugliness out that window,

that particular point of view. And they all agree with you. Right. You know, oh, it's so horrible. Oh, yes, it is. And so you all have that. And you're all watching that. Then over there is this other portal, this other window where you appreciate. And the moment you say namaste, it's a moment of appreciating another. It's a moment of giving away. So the over there in this window is praise, appreciation, people who are loving, people who are happy, and all of those that are feeling that way are all in agreement with each other. Oh, it's such a beautiful day. Isn't it beautiful? Yes, people are so kind. So anyway, then there's that. And you can really be there. But then you can be at this other place too. And so Alex always calls it navigating the

turn, getting from one, when you get stuck on that one, where you can like everything's going down the toilet. And then how do you get, how do you get out of that? You know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And there isn't anything that you can do about it. But yet, there are days and moments and times when love life is so much filled with love and light and joy. So, hey, I big love light and joy any day, but I have some moments that are just dark, you know. But this, you know, I want to talk a little bit about this concept of these windows that we can look through. And one, one area where it gets a little sinister is that there's a specific window that we can look through the window of psychedelics. But if they catch you looking through the window,

they'll put your ass in a dungeon. The people looking through the window, the window into the dark world, the hellish demonic energies, the world of power and control, those bastards, not only are they not satisfied looking through their, their shit mirror, but if they catch, or if the window, if they catch you looking through the window, a certain window, they'll kill you. That's where it gets sinister, because it'd be great if they, you know, if they just wanted to hang out, stare out at the darkness and enjoy that, that level of this dimension, fine, whatever. But look at the evolution. Look at what's evolving. There are these pockets of freedom. That's right. There are places in this world where freedom is evolving.

Taking root. It's taking root, and it's taking over, really. I mean, there is sacramental culture reemerging all over the planet, and it's unstoppable, unstoppable at this point. And so the really intelligent thing to do would be to get behind it and to allow it. I wish the president would sign a petition to say stop apprehending people who smoke pot, stop doing anything about it, abolish the DEA, you know, stop this mad war on drugs started by a traitor, Richard Nixon, who didn't listen to his own doctors, who said legalize it. It should have been legalized then. It would have been more compassionate for all of the other people. I feel that this is a civil rights issue at this point. Yes, it is. It is actually a class war that was started, a way to

subjugate people of color, a way to, you know, to subjugate an entire people who think different, you know, who are peaceful and who have chosen a different lifestyle. These are people, these people should be set free, and they are rotting in prisons all over the planet for thinking differently. That's right. And if they do no harm to anyone else, then these kinds of cognitive liberties should be part of the understanding of our basic freedoms. I think it's freedom of religion because there is no other religion which has actually proven to allow contact with mystical experience, and in fact guarantees it in 65% of the people who take psilocybin, who are spiritually inclined. Now it's been proven twice, once at the Marsh Chapel,

Good Friday experiment by Walter Panky, and back in 1962, and then 2006 by Roland Griffiths in Psychopharmacology, the great magazine, is confirmed. I'm not familiar with that one. Oh, Roland Griffiths was the guy who did a much tighter controlled experiment and was published in the highest quality journal about this kind of subject. And what was the results? His results were the same as Panky's, basically that 65% of the time spiritually inclined people will have actual mystical experiences, experiences that would are about total unity with transcendent divine reality and transcendence of space and time, a noetic quality that is beyond words, and yet it's positive. So all of these elements that occur are practically universally occurring.

All 100% of the people say that they were glad that they did it, even though there were moments that were terrifying. It was overall a positive learning experience for all of them. And again, I don't want to hear you two are so glowing and wonderful. I don't mean to keep going back to the sinister aspect of the prohibition, but I really want to use the term sinister because if what's coming out of these studies is not only do they improve your life, help you quit smoking, help you quit drinking, help rewire the habitual patterns that are maybe degrading- PTSD studies. PTSD, it seems to allow people to go to those dark moments and somehow- Unhook from them. Unhook. To talk about PTSD today and not include the MDMA trials

and studies in that conversation, because I've seen it on the news, I saw it in the radio lab, they had a spot on. To talk about PTSD today without mentioning the MDMA studies is to be trying to manipulate research and the press. I think it's wrong, but I just wanted to also say though, let's look at our evolution too, because when I was writing about secret writing in 1976 for my master's thesis, I did not mention where I first saw it, which was under psychedelics. I talked about body art, I talked about all kinds of things, things that were relevant and true, but I left out that key place where it originated because I couldn't in 1976 write a paper and have teachers read that. I had done LSD. Today, the conversation

is out, the cat is out of the bag. What do you do to make great changes? Harvey Milk came out, you know what I'm saying? We are coming out, that's what we're doing. Coming out means more freedom and more demands because we are successful and we are part of the society and we are more infiltrating society. Our president admits now to having smoked and not received any harm from it. We have organizations like MAPS that are raising millions of dollars for this research and finding some all-success, incredible success. Anyway, we are evolving. I just wanted to say that about the sinister forces. They're not ahead of us. The science is helping us to perhaps put a greater context around these sacraments. I think that the reframing

of these as sacraments is important, too, because what's really happening is interrupting freedom of religion, which people really understand that. They would like people to allow them, like the Native American church, they use peyote. It's part of their tradition. It's a sacrament. Now Native Americans are allowed to use cannabis and sell it and grow it and everything. It's free. On the reservations, cannabis is now legal. Yes, that doesn't mean they're going to do it nor whether they want to do it either, but it is a more leniency that's coming out through the current administration. I think that those are good signs. Of course, the Colorado's and Washington's breakthroughs of legalization have been nothing but beneficial.

Oregon, too. Of course, there have been concerns and things like that, but they've overall been very positive for the states. If we would be reasonable monkeys and look at the results and say, what we need to do is chill the monkeys down and make them stop killing each other and be more peaceful. This kind of very mild and sacrament is a way for us to tap into the intelligence of nature. I think of this as the green Jesus, part of the way that, well, I say that because I like to think about the first coming of Christ was when Christ revealed the divinity of humanity. Now, the second coming is when there's a revelation of the divinity of nature. We have to understand that our place in the environment and create a sustainable

sacred relationship with our planet and the life web. If you have a realization of the divinity of nature, then you will... That's the green Jesus in a way. That's the divine light. That is Christ consciousness. That is the interconnectedness of all things. You could call it even Buddhic awareness. At that level of mystic oneness, then you've tapped into a reality that is hardcore fabric of reality, I think. And you will immediately experience the reverence for life. If you see the divinity, you'll feel the reverence. If you feel the reverence, you won't have to enforce environmental laws because now you're with your lover. You're being completely overwhelmed by the Christ energy instead of... That's beautiful. I love that concept and I think

psychedelics are the one way into that. But what's another way into it? Because I think some people... Let me tell you that. Okay, let me say that I have a bit of an eccentric understanding of... Please continue. Sorry, I just wanted to say... I don't want to... Okay, cool. Oh, 108. Ha, great. Awesome. Are we going on too long? No. I only said 108 because that's the... Perfect number. That's the... That's the... We've gone one round around. Yeah, that's right. Round the mala. So... Oh, I'm sorry. May I stop you? I'm going to... Yes, please. Since we already interrupt this, I'm just going to save it because this is the best part, my favorite podcast of all time. If I lost it, I would immediately throw myself off

for the break, my sweet friends. I had to save that because if I lost this conversation that we just had, I think I would have... I just would have given up on everything and gone to the jungle. Back with Alex and Allison. We were... In the break, we were just talking a little bit about... And you guys have heard me rave about this forever. Adinkra's... The idea of supersymmetry and the... Symbolic representation of mathematical equations that are being used to try to articulate the idea we live in a supersymmetrical universe, which I'm not going to pretend I understand what that means. But I was just talking... I was telling these two about the finding of ones and zeros inside of these symbols, which is a go-to topic for people under the notion of simulation theory,

or the idea that the universe that we exist in appears to be some kind of simulation, that we are actually in a very advanced computer system where we are kind of artificial and tell... Our meat jackets are actually just strings of computer code that are operating under the illusion that they're individuals, when in fact they're just part of some form of simulation being run by... We don't know who or why just yet. That's chapter one of the matrix, if I recall. That's right. Yeah, it is the matrix or the matrix comes from it. It also is... I've heard someone say, well, when people use symbols to describe God, they're always going to use whatever the symbols are for the highest tech at the time. So what we have right now is a

very advanced computer simulation. What they had back then was... The reflection of the entire universe is the reflection of a tree on a lake, and the thing that we think is the universe is actually like staring into a reflection and thinking that that wavering thing is the tree, when in fact you're just seeing a reflection of it. It's the same idea, but what do you guys think about that, that the new science coming out, which seems to indicate that the universe that we are living in is a computer simulation? Have you ever heard of that before, simulation theory? Yes, and I think that there is a similarity between that and the Hindu notions of Maya, that the world we see is a delusional, separative, kind of dumbed-down

dimension where we're not privy to the guts and gizmos that run it. Perhaps with the pulse of the times, it feels more like the quote knowledge that we have at the times. It looks like we're seeing this and there's an interpretation for you. There's consciousness that seems ever changing, Maya-like, and so this mirror of reflectivity that is the outer world, which we codify and try to, as Einstein said, that the miracle of the physical world is that we can understand anything at all. And so with the code books that we have for this external world, what I think is the artist's duty is to translate the inner dimensions and bring them out to this one. And we kind of translate between those dimensions, the inner world and the outer

world. And how about that scientist, that woman scientist in Science Magazine? Right, as we were saying before, that everything that we experience is a figment of our imagination. Now what they're doing is that they're trying to take the pulse of what the imagination is, and they want to define it and codify it by this dimension's reality structures. Now that doesn't, in any way, confine it. It's only this outer world. That's not the inner world and it never will be. You can't reduce them. So it's the mirror side of the, you know, it's like Alice going through the looking glass, you know, unless you have that consciousness that is aware that you're navigating those dimensions. And that actually, what your experience is a projection, a projection probably

modulated by your own DMT drip, you're at this level of reality, keeping us stabilized. That's why you have to take the suppressants. When you do the ayahuasca, it's this suppressant that you have to have that keeps you from modulating. We keep modulating, we keep, you know, running on the same level of reality. And so this suppresses our ability, our resistance. Takes the foot off the break. Exactly. So you can see a different level of reality. Right. And that level, that higher, I see I like that because, you know, the way I try to describe it always does create this differentiation. Like there's a here and a there where it's more like, no, it's all here. It's just the particular way. It's your consciousness, still. Well, it's like x-rays. You can't see them,

but you can make them do things. You can get the effect of them. You can, you know, and other tests, other, all the, you know, the radio waves and all the waves that are invisible were used to be thought of as, you know, they didn't exist. But now we know that they exactly, now we know that they do. And so we know how to affect them. And we're learning how to affect these other realms and how to, you know, how to get there and how to make that experience work in the other, the realm that we live in, the material realm. And this is, this brings me to a weird question or a topic I wanted to discuss with you, which is 3D printers, the emergence of 3D printers. And I was wondering, as artists, as visual artists, what you thought, thought about that and where that's going. Let

me just say that we sell 3D prints on our, in our store. We have a maker bought and we sell them both unpainted and painted. Yes. We've been doing it for a year. We got our first bought December of last year. And so now it's been about a year, do very well as their beautiful ways that people that love us and love our project can, you know, support to a certain level. There's cheapest $25 and as much as $250. I just want to look it up right now. They're so beautiful. How long does it take to print each one out? We'll send you one, Duncan. You're sorry we didn't bring you one. We were both sorry we didn't bring you one. It takes an hour to print one out? No, hours, many hours. From nine to 15 hours, I would say, for the size that we're doing. But let me just say one thing really important

about 3D printing since you brought it up. Please. Entheon, the sanctuary of visionary art that we are building now and right now is only in the cinder block stage, will be a 3D printed, it'll actually be 3D printed 20 and 20 foot sections as large as 20 foot by 8 sections. And some of them smaller than that because it'll be overlapping sculptures really. It's an ornamental concrete cast exterior. So first you have the art itself, which is something the poster that we gave you is a picture of that art. Thank you. And then they make a scan. They make a foam model of that in pieces. And then they make a fiberglass mold and then they spray glass reinforced cast concrete into that mold. And I just wanted to say that the pantheon dome is made of cast concrete. So it's an

ancient and venerable material for a temple. Many, many great buildings are made of cast concrete and ornamental cast concrete. But this is a new way of doing ornamental cast concrete by print out, which you can then interact and you can, you know, you get this print out, you can kind of work on it, you can sculpt it more, you can smooth it. So anyway, that is the way Entheon will be in its final phase. You see this, that's wild to me. I did not know that that's how you were doing that. But I did want to ask you about 3D printing just because the world that you're talking about, the inner universe or the cosmos that we see on psychedelics, the visionary realm, the visionary realm, I think we all agree it's alive. That's a living thing. It's a living thing.

And it wants to be expressed. And it's using us as printers to express itself. But 3D printers, it gets really interesting to me because 3D printers almost feel as though it's getting us to construct a doorway that it can come through in a more detailed way. And when you pair the concept of 3D printers with the idea of AI and the notion that computers are about to wake up and the next, I guess it's within like Kurzweil, what does he say, 12 to 30 years or something, we're going to see AI waking up. That means that computers are going to be making art, pairing it with 3D printers. And it just means, and this brings us to McKinna's singularity or the opening of the Great Portal where it all just comes pouring out. The transdimensional object at the end of history.

That transdimensional object at the end of history, it feels like one of the ways that it's going to come into this dimension is through some more advanced version of 3D printers. It's helping us. It's helping us. I mean, there's organs. I mean, bones can be made that are the exact same and everything will attach. I mean, it's helping us. And it already does. I mean, I don't know anybody's phone number anymore. It's all on my phone. It already is the singularity. It knows more than I know in that area. This is cool that you guys are using 3D printers. Can I add something to there? This Friday, we're going to bring the stage that was fabricated from the same 3D model that was made by the artist, Ryan Tottle. Right here in Hollywood.

Ryan Tottle is an amazing artist, a visionary artist who is currently working at Disney, won an Oscar for his animator. He and his wife are extraordinary, Aline, and they are great Disney animators and just sculptors in their own right. And he, out of his own gift, over more than a year, he and I worked on developing Entheon and building it as a 3D entity, a 3D model. And so he sculpted the God heads according to feedback and things that I sent him drawings of my idea of Entheon. And he translated it into an amazing 3D object, which will be printed. So this is a- It's all coming from his computer sculpting. He's an incredible sculptor. He is an amazing sculptor. He's a- That I want to say one more,

one more honoring of Ryan, though. Right. Well, I mean, the stage is going to be there this Friday. And so we have a variety of objects that he has helped to sculpt and bring into the world. So this is how we're empowered to do 3D objects is through the gift of this great artist. Wow. I want to say, though, one of the ways that we're developing to support the building of a temple in Hudson Valley, this chasm, is to have these objects. And we have a few little objects, but the newest help that Ryan has given us has to do with the Entheon. And I have to honor that I had this commitment this year to create an urn, but the urn ends up being also, well, for ashes and stashes. That's really what it is. It's a stash box as well. And it's a great

Entheon. Whoa, cool. So I did it to honor my parents. And now, and Ryan helped to sculpt Entheon into an urn. It's a little, going to be a little box. And people can have one and help us to build Chasm because it all proceeds to all of our anything that we sell anywhere or do anything goes to building temple. Wow. We don't take any money. We go to this, the Fonda Theater and all that. They give it to Chasm. Let's, here we go. There's the Entheon. We're showing it to you. Holy shit. So cool, man. Wow. So that's beautiful. And you're 3D printing these. Wow. Yes, we are. That is, this is amazing. You guys are really, really flipping me out just because you're doing, like, you guys are doing the thing. Like, when I, if I managed- We thought we thought if we're a

church, shouldn't we have an urn? We should, we're artists. We're artists of a church. So anyway, it's an art church. So anyway, we should create an urn. People, you know, might be, you know, willing to use it for ashes or stashes. I mean, or both, or both. This is beautiful. Like, you got, is there a place online where people can see this? Yes. Not yet. No, no, no. It's still in its formative stages. Yeah, but they ask for it. It's going to be amazing. It's coming very soon. You guys have to go check this out. It is- This is going to build a temple. The idea that you could have one of these in your house, it's so cool. It's this beautiful, it's an altar piece. It's an altar object. Keeps something precious in it. That's right. This, so this is really cool. I,

this is, I've had this, I have fantasy and sorry guys listening because you've heard me yap about it before, but you haven't yet to see virtual reality. You haven't seen it yet. It's pretty incredible. And, you know, right now, a lot of people are talking about it as something that we will use for video games and entertainment, recreation. But I have this, idea of a group of people putting on virtual reality glasses and being able to, in VR, in the VR world, obviously not in the real world, you can fly, you know? And so having this, you know, a space, I don't know what it looks like, but a gigantic glob of digital putty, you wouldn't actually be able to feel it, but this sort of digital stuff, which they already have,

they have software where you can emulate clay, but a giant, giant like skyscraper size glob of this in this space where your avatar could fly with hundreds of other avatars and sculpt this stuff. And then after, you know, whenever completion is, I think you might have to just put a time limit on it. But when the thing has been sculpted, that could be printed out in 3D printers. And the group that sculpted it could have this miniaturized version of this skyscraper size thing filled with all the various, whatever, the different ways people imprinted themselves on it, you could wear it or have it. And in that moment that you create this thing, which you guys are already doing it, but where the liminal place between here and there starts spurting out into

this dimension, you know, and that's really cool to me. I hope maybe, I hope you, I want to be in charge of the virtual reality part of your art. Yes, yes. Yes, let's come up with stuff. We should do more. Well, I've always felt you that Alex, animation, Alex has worked on several animations and maybe doing more of that in the future. Well, the great artists of tool, Adam Jones, really invited me to participate with him on animation. So I've been working with some 3D artists and things over the time and translating these visions into a moving image kind of realities for people. Do you see them in your mind? Do you see your paintings as fluid or spaces, spaces, portals for transdimensional goo? Yeah, there, I do like the idea of

approaching an art object as something to identify with. See, that was part of the key of sacred art. Sacred art was a way of creating an avatar that was a better you. It was something that you knew you could be and that you could aspire toward. Like seeing your guru at various places is a symbol of mastery that is a reflection of the own, the possibility of your own mastery in your own life. And whatever it is, it is reminding you of that archetype. Oh, and so, awesome water. Thank you. That's beautiful. So the, you know, and I've heard this, you know, just listening to some Pema children doing a visual. She's amazing. I love her. Doing a visualization exercise of visualizing your guru and your teachers. But I see you're saying that

visualization is not so much the actual person. Well, it is, but who are they for you? I mean, who they are is a symbol of the unrealized potential that you have. Right. They're someone who has really mastered an aspect or an element of themselves to such a degree that they're a clearer lens for the divine, infinite wisdom and energy of love and everything like that to flow through and to just be an open spigot. You know, it's like people get love drunk around people, you know. Yes. And so the, it's like, it's a fragrance or something like people are just like, they fall over like. That's what it's like around us. You know, exactly. And so that kind of open wound to the divine, I think, is what you want to open up in a sacred holy place.

And it's why wound. Why do you use the term wound? Because it's by offering. It's by a righteous task that we transcend are doing it for, for the material gain. And so the element of righteousness allows, you know, if you're self-wounding in some way, then others won't follow there. You know, you get hurt if you go around that way there, you know. It's like, you got to be able to, unwilling to risk everything. You got to be able to invest yourself completely. And so that's the wound. The wound is just being completely open. And I mean, you could say the cosmic vagina that all of us as vessels of divinity have. If you are a closed and constricted vessel, you know, you're not allowing your cosmic vagina to open or to be penetrated by the

divine holy influx, you know. And so you can use it whatever portal or opening, whatever is meaningful. And so it's possible and it's been repeated over millennia that human beings anchor that kind of energy in a place. So we have sacred places. And there are some places that they've just, they've always been sacred. They're just, they, they, whenever they were created thousands of years ago, which, and they weren't there before that, but they, they appeared after glaciers or something like that, then they, then that state of things had a magnificence, you know. And, and it was so magnificent that spirits of the land, you know, when they were growing things and things like that, just kind of huddled up in special places and made it especially resonant. And,

and so those special places that people would go to, they'd be attracted to it too, you know, that the special like, like mecca. Yeah. That's, that's one of the big ones. That's because every, every Muslim has to go there in their lifetime at least once and they have to circle. No, because you're not allowed to go. You can't go in the city of mecca unless you're a Muslim. Wow. But you could just say you are. I mean, there's no blood test for that. You know, you have to behave like one and actually look like one too. Although I'm sure they do come from all parts of the world. I wouldn't want to invade mecca. I'm sorry for even hinting that you would like trick your way into that place. Well, they have wonderful pictures of it. And I,

I have, you know, I remember when Zina did a report on it in high school, I got really into it. And, and because one of the things that they do at mecca, by the way, is it's, it's, it's a meteorite. It's really a meteorite that was touched by Abraham. And then it was touched by Muhammad later, but it was touched by people. So, but it existed before Abraham and it was already a pilgrimage site when Abraham came along. Okay. So, so nobody knows where it came from, but it became this, this thing that you had to touch. And then they built this cube around it. And if anybody knows my work, you know how I love those because cube means material world. It doesn't mean, you know, spiritual world. It doesn't mean, you know, it means material world. It's like, we are building

a box around this thing. We are protecting it in the material world. We're protecting this. Anyway, but not only that, they create a fabric velvet, golden broidered, you know, a covering for this small building, basically, you know, it's just like, and it has to, and they keep making them. They make them. Oh, they do. Oh yeah, because over time, it just, you know, and they put a new one on it. It's amazing. It's gorgeous. And they show pictures of like how they embroidered with gold. And, you know, and people go there and they circle. So the pictures that the stop motion pictures are amazing. It's like churning the milky ocean. Oh, I do think. Yes. It's like, it's like a Tibetan prayer wheel too. Keep it turning. And it's circumambulation. And you could

almost just, you know, like you see the heat when you could see heat rising up from the ground. You can see when you see that, that weird, whatever that is, that flow, it's such a strange, it does seem like that is. It's like a dance in a way because they're, everyone is doing the same thing. They're walking at a certain pace. They're packed, you know, and they're walking at a certain pace so they could all just go keep circling. And I just wanted to say one other thing that the Santa Dame people that you do in Alaska, they do, when they are in true ceremony, they are in uniform and they have all women on one side and all men on the other side and they, and they, and they wear these white, everyone's in white and they have these green sashes and women wear tiaras and they

do the two step. So they're basically, so you have the stop motion pictures of them doing it. And it's the same kind of thing. It churns back and forth and the men call and the women response and the men call and they have these songs, the Portuguese songs, the men call the women response. It's very like the, very like the, what do they call it? The call response into Kirtan, right? It's just like Kirtan, but it's Portuguese and it's Christian about Jesus and Mary and they're calling respondent two step and they're white. It's like, oh my God, you know that the power and the energy that they are honing is extremely powerful. They're working holy polarities and they're probably bathing in a energetic occurrence that is a kind of a, a group soul,

I think of, of humanity because we're uniquely suited with this apparatus as a kind of antenna to the gods or to the spiritual realm to the one. And so we're uniquely suited when we have these big auras and things like that. And when we're devotionally pilgrimageing and things like that, there's a shared field, a kind of a group soul and the group soul collective light body element is something that empowers people in ways that, you know, you feel separate sometimes in your daily life and going around by yourself and stuff and you forget about the web of beings, the net of beings that we're part of and that we're creating something with. And so it's a way of reclaiming and recovering that sense of overcoming alienation for a moment by remembering the field.

Yeah, I, I get that when I go to the, these Ram Dass retreats, you get that it's the same, you know, you realize, I don't know what it is, but it's definitely something you can't get at by yourself. And I love that this is something that you both are encouraging people to do, to, to commune together and that you're, that you have the guts to do that. Man, I'm such a recluse. The idea, sometimes I sit here and I think maybe I should have people over to, to meditate together. And then I think, fuck that people, I'm never going to do that. And I feel so, you have to go where it calls you, it calls you to do this podcast and it's getting better and better. So you just immerse yourself in the thing that really calls you and

make it better and better and you will grow. It's, it's called, it's called becoming mature. We have many, many ways of being creative and we don't want to just narrow ourselves down. Every artist has more than one horse to ride, you know what I mean? We, we all do, like Alex and I say, we have three bodies of work between us, but, but you, you may have another, like you're, you may be a musician too, I don't know, but, but in any case, you've, you hone your, your, the direction that you go in and maybe you don't organize events at your home, you know what I mean? Not everybody has to do that. You do this and this is so awesome. Yeah. Also, I don't, I just, yeah, I couldn't do it, but I, I wanted to, I don't want to keep you guys here, here, I feel like

I'm, I did want to say the, when we were leaving, I was about to tell my version of the kind of tale of Sacramento civilization. Yes. And if we could go there for a moment, I'll try to synopsize it. No, by the way, I have as much time as you have. There is no, I've nowhere to be. So please don't, I, I would. That's dangerous. Don't say that. Okay. All right. Anyway, just tell us about Sacramento culture. Okay. So in digging around a number of people now, not just Graham Hancock or Terence McKenna, but a number of archaeologists and anthropologists as well have gone back to cave art and found in a number of places. And the Tosheely stuff is like world famous, but mushroom gods with mushroom headed gods carrying mushrooms, running around, seeming to be part of

divine flowing energy from 9,000 BC or something, you know. Sprouty mushrooms out of their eyes, and things like that in their heads. You know, Peruvian stuff you've got. So all over the world, you've got actual Sacramento cultures acknowledging their use of sacraments for thousands of years, and it's worldwide. And so the, let's look at, you know, the foundation of Eastern civilization, you got the Kaikion, that Socrates and a number of the, the folks that talked about the platonic solids and the sacred geometries and things like that, the archetypal realm, the ideal realm, that realm that preceded material world reality, they had a lens into that world with the sacrament, the Kaikion, and it was embedded in the Elysianian mysteries, and they had a very strict religious

code. It was the civic religion of Greece for a thousand years, and so the number of people who experienced that, and the number of people who might have continued that tradition clandestinely after the church started to suppress it and things like that, but as a hidden subculture of many cultures where it was repressed, it's fascinating because the, okay, let's, we've established that Eastern civilization, if we look at Greece as being the foundation of East, of Western civilization, sorry, it is with a sacramental substance, so you have to say that it was involved. A sacred sacramental substance was involved in the foundation of Western civilization. What was that substance? Kaikion. Oh, I see, I'm sorry. The Kaikion is the unknown

drink. It was an elixir that everyone during the Elysianian mysteries had to imbibe this and see the gods. It was putting you in contact with the divine realm. This is like Western Soma. We don't know what it is, but okay. And so the Eastern, you've got the Soma. Right. Right, with the Hindu, the Rig Veda. So it's all about Soma. So you've got the foundations of both Eastern and Western civilization deeply indebted to psychedelia, to psychedelic sacrament, and it revealed the realm of the gods. So it put them in contact with visionary reality. It gave them mystical experience that was the foundation of their religion. Now, Hinduism still exists. It's a living sacramental tradition, actually. And so even though they don't talk about Soma,

at least cannabis is still acknowledged by a large portion, not all, but some of Hindus to be... Shy whites. Exactly. It's a powerful sacramental substance. And for that reason alone, let alone all the medicinal effects, it should be legal worldwide, so that anyone who enjoys freedom of religion could check out that portal. So obviously, that was beginning there. And we already talked about South America and Central America. It was completely filled with psychedelics, and their art was completely filled with it. Okay, why didn't we hear about this or see it? We haven't, until Terence started talking about it. And then a number of people started talking about it. And we start to see, well, wait a minute, what was the forbidden fruit? That was kind of a

cosmic smackdown of sacramental tradition. Wow. That was kind of like a, oh no, you don't, you know? And what happened then? Oh, we are the arbiters of your deliverance. I'm sorry, you can no longer see the Godhead yourself, but we will tell you about how it's going with the Godhead. And all you need to do is do this. And by the way, how much you got? And so it grows a power structure that is about more manipulation of the minds of people and their lives and their fortunes and what not, rather than the experience of real God. And so that primary religious experience, which is the mystical experience, personal contact with divine, becomes somehow a story about somebody that at one time had an experience. One time had a mystical experience. Now, it was always the

mystical experience. Look at every world religion. They were all visionary, mystical experiences. You can talk about the ride on the Barak, the female-headed mule that Muhammad took to the seventh heaven in order to have his mystical experience in contact with through Gabriel and all the various angels and the great divine. Oh, it's an amazing saga, his journey into the upper worlds to have this. So Muhammad wrote visionary experience. He wrote a donkey with a woman's head. Yeah, and wings, rainbow-like colored wings, yeah. Into heaven. Yes. And that being was called a Barak? The Barak, yes. The Barak. Yes. Wild. Yes. That's crazy. It's a B-A-R-A-Q. Okay. Wow. So he, I should study. It's Arabic actually. It's amazing. That tale is just an

amazing tale and, you know, it's so incredible. But then there's Moses. Yeah, then Moses had the burning bush kind of turning point there. You had Mary had an angel that said, fear not, you know, that was kind of like maybe a scary, weird kind of visionary DMT kind of angel was saying, you know, hey, you've been chosen, girl, you know. And so that was freaky, you know. But it was a visionary, mystical experience. Look, and Buddha put his hand on the ground to dispel the demons of Mara that were all the visions that were coming down. But what did he really see? He saw like that the cosmic principle of reality should be witnessed by the earth mother, you know, and touch the planet. And the earth is my witness. The cosmic principle of reality is my witness,

you know, and, and that everything disappeared. And it was enlightenment. So no matter what religion you, you choose, if you go to the genesis of it, it's a visionary, mystical experience. What gives us the visionary, mystical experience, 65% of the spiritually inclined people time, right, it's sacrament. So universally, we've seen that that was the way it used to be, that religion was in contact with these sacramental substances, keeping them absolutely sacred, not everybody doing them all the time, but at special times with a special group as a sacred thing to really journey, to really find the center of your soul, to really find what God wants for you to do in this lifetime, to take it that seriously and to

try and heal whatever is going on that's going wrong in your life with the most sincere and utter openness to the possibility that there could be an answer. You open yourself, you surrender yourself to that completely and see what happens. 65% of the time, a good thing happens. So that's why now at this time, now, okay, we talked about the forbidden fruit. Now, this goes into my very weird story about the Jewish people and what the chosen people's task is, what they were chosen for, what they were chosen for, of course, is to reveal true God, but here's the way to do it. The cosmic smackdown happens. No, you don't get the sacrament. Oh, you have to come through us. Okay, so a lot of reason develops over 2000 years that took us

into really understanding material world reality. We had to understand it with a kind of granularity that had never been achieved in order to have the technologies that we have today and to really have the understanding that science is giving us, the foundation of a real understanding of God's glory, really. How did God fabricate this amazing mystery? This is really incredible, you know. So this is the foundation, I think, of sacramental culture today, that now what is it that 1897, this is when the psychedelic era began. Hefter somehow analyzed that Mescaline was the... Who was this? Who did this? Hefter. Over in Germany. He was a German chemist that distilled Mescaline from peyote. This is pre-Hoffmann? Yeah, yeah. 1897.

Gotcha, okay. Okay, 1897. Now, around the same time Marie Curie and the x-ray Rentgen discovers the atomic radiation, the birth of the atomic era, around the same time, 1897. In 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, a group met. It was the first Zionist Congress, and they said 50 years from today, people will know that this meeting was the foundation of the nation of Israel. Same year, 1897, birth of the psychedelic era, atomic era, and the Jewish state. Okay, coincidence. Here's my chosen people idea. Okay, so now fast forward. April 19th, 1943, Bicycle Day. Albert Hoffmann discovers LSD and takes a wild bicycle ride back home. Okay, now at the same exact moment, what was going on in Jewish history in the war, the depths

of the war. Okay. Wow. It was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Germans went in to burn down the Warsaw Ghetto, and guess what? The Jews fought back, never had happened before, spike on the novelty curve. Wait, I'm sorry, are you saying that the same time as Bicycle Day? No, the uprising was the same day. Same day, same time. Holy shit, that's crazy. That's crazy. Okay, now, okay. So, fast forward to the birth of the nation of Israel. Now, what is the most important, probably, sacrament to humanity and longest friend, cannabis? Even George Washington, the president of the friggin United States used to smoke it with all the founding fathers. Okay, that's what cannabis really is. It's an old friend to humanity. So, where do we find the

pharmacology of what makes cannabis, THC, CBD, Hebrew University, wouldn't have existed without the nation of Israel? Wait, oh man, you are really blasting my mind right now. That is true. I mean, that is really true. That's a fact. Okay, look at Rick Strossman. Okay, DMT. Yes, stirred it up really a lot. And he comes from a family of rabbis. Look at his new book, DMT in the Soul of Prophecy, goes back to the Hebrew Bible and to the visionary experiences that happened to the prophets and was seeing that all of these corollaries actually line up better with the mystical experience and of the importance of the psychedelic experience that he's talking about rather than, say, the Buddhist cartography or some of the other stuff. So, okay, now along

comes Rick Doblin, a man who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the nation of Israel. This is maps. Maps wouldn't exist. For those of you who don't know, maps is the multi-disciplinary association of psychedelic studies. These are the folks who are in the front lines of the war too in the prohibition on psychedelics by doing legal stringent studies to demonstrate their beneficial medicinal qualities so that they could eventually be prescribed. Need I say more than the word Ram Dass? I was about to say Ram Dass. Yeah, right. Alpert. Sure. Oh man, I've never in my life wanted to be Jewish more than I do at this moment. Well, and then, of course, I will get Allison too. She's a renegade Jewish

philosopher, but I feel that there are threads that the chosen people were chosen to take away the sacrament and to help bring it back. That is the most trippy thing I've ever heard to summarize or just to rearticulate where you're saying you're saying that the prohibition on psychedelics forced people or compelled people to advance the sciences in a way that might not have happened had people been taking sacraments and then because of that it allowed for a kind of amplification of the very same sacraments which we are at the very beginning phases of that right now today. Like in a nutshell, Paracelsus, the last alchemist and the first chemist 500 years ago in Basel, Switzerland,

decided that something was needed in order to find the philosopher's stone, something that didn't exist now in alchemy. And so he felt that the more codification we had and the more understanding, dispassionately, without getting our emotions involved with the reactions of chemistry and things like that, the more dispassionately that we could describe the interaction of elements and the more codified that we could become, the better science we could have, the better understanding basically we could have, and this would help lead to the philosopher's stone, which, okay, so Paracelsus was taking the psyche out of the interaction of elements, okay, that's what alchemy was all about. So who brings it back? Dr. Hoffman in the same town,

you know. God damn it, that's crazy. 500 years later in the same town he invents philosopher's stone, the philosopher's stone, the thing that really blows people's minds and really begins a catalyst of change in the world. I'm speechless. And he wasn't Jewish, all right, but I just want to say, there's a lot of good people out there, our friend Yochai in Israel and there's a better company, they're doing a lot of research on cannabis and high concentrations and things like that, cannabis because it's not toxic, and not addictive, can be concentrated and actually help people with, you know, with all kinds of muscle and muscular dystrophy, there's all kinds of folks that are being helped with CBD and stuff.

Oh yeah, yeah, right. There's just an incredible amount of research going on there and they're really ahead of anyone else, I think, because they were the originators of medical cannabis research and Rick Doblin's family, basically like their buildings named after his family, I mean his family founded the state of Israel, his grandparents and stuff, and here he is doing what he can do, all of our friends, they're such heroes, you know. It's just a sidebar, it's not, you know, but interesting. No, that's more than a sidebar. That is, it's incredible to see the way that these, for some reason, these forms emerge through history that clearly there is a purpose, a pattern, there's something happening, but we're not sure

exactly. Look at the ayahuasca churches. Jeffrey Bromfman, he is the head of the UDV. First psychedelic, legal psychedelic church for white people in America, going to the Supreme Court. He took it all the way to the Supreme Court. There's no one else that could have done that. To have the ayahuasca in his church in Santa Fe in Mexico. So the second coming that you're talking about, recognizing the divinity of nature in prophecy is happening, is it being, the people in the front of that, or the midwives of this thing would be the Jews. And what they're giving birth to, or what they're bringing out of the nothingness into the somethingness is psychedelic in nature, or is it psychedelic medicine?

Perhaps an opening, a portal to the, you know, trans-dimensional goo of love. You know, the real God. You guys, I think that's a perfect place to close the show. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been such an honor. One of the great moments of my life. Thank you so much. Guys, by the way, definitely come this Friday. It's at the Henry Ford Theater. Henry Fonda. Henry Fonda, forgive me, Henry Ford. No, no. Henry Fonda Theater. I'm going to be there. All DTFH people out there, please gather together at this event. It's going to, as you can see, it's going to be a mind-blower.

Please come, come to that. I'll have all the details about how to get tickets. Great music, random rub. It helps to support Entheon. A lot of great musicians will be there. And this is a great way to support Entheon. I'm going to have all the links at dunkintrustle.com. I will have also tweeted about it by then so you can go on my Twitter stream and see links. No problem. And come see us on Friday. Thank you so much, you guys. Love you. Love you back. Love you. That was Alex and Allison Gray. Definitely come out this Friday, December the 16th, to watch them at the Henry Fonda Theater. And a big thanks to Squarespace.com for supporting this podcast. Go check them out. Go to Squarespace.com. Use offer code

Duncan and you will get 10% off your first purchase and show support of the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast. Also, why not subscribe to us on iTunes? Give us a nice rating. Give yourself a big hug. Listen to Alex and Allison Gray. Come up with some idea bigger than what you think you can accomplish and go accomplish it this week within the next hour. You could do it. Love you guys. I'll see you next week. We got some great shows coming up. We've got Dennis McKenna, Tim Ferriss, Dr. Drew, Nick Kroll, Ragu, Marcus, and Sarah Swati, Marcus, Emil Amos, Aubrey Marcus, and Danieli Beleli. So many great episodes coming up. I hope you'll continue to listen and thank you for listening. I love you guys and I'll see you soon.

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