Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Jim Woodring

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

Duncan is joined by visionary artist and creator of the FRANK series JIM WOODRING  They talk about art, vedanta, meditation, and of course FRANK! This episode brought to you by squarespace.com  go to squarespace and enter in offer code duncan to receive 10% off your first order.

One in four car batteries is weak and needs to be replaced. Let our professional parts people test your battery for free at O'Reilly Auto Parts. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the Web Messiahs over at Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan to receive 10% off your first order for your beautiful, incredible, wonderful website. Squarespace, start here, go anywhere except for inside the sun or outside of the gravity well that you're currently stuck on as you are slowly dissolved by the forces of time and space. Let's get going with today's episode with the amazing Jim Woodring. Hello, Super Compress Store houses of amnesiac alien information disguised as

ambling towers of sentient meat. It is I, Duncan Tressel, and you're listening to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast. And recently I came upon this amazing interview between Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast Star Talk and Edward Snowden. And I wanted to play a quick clip from this interview for you. We're going to ask ourselves, how will an alien want to communicate with us? Let's say, and let's say the civilization is intelligent or more intelligent than we are, they would find a pretty efficient way to send a signal to reduce the energy costs for them. Perhaps I'm making this up, but it's not a stretch to imagine this. By doing so, they would try to find any reducible information in the signal they want to send us and represent that in some other kind of way

that is less representative of information. Isn't that correct? Isn't that what they would want to do? Am I even saying that right? You know, when you mention that, it brings up a really interesting idea, which is that let's say all societies that have open communications, they have communications over there, under the ground, eventually discover that they need to encrypt their communications to protect them. So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means. So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything

that they're hearing from our civilization, if there are indeed aliens out there, all of their communications are encrypted by default. So what we are hearing that's actually an alien television show or a phone call or a message between their planet and their own GPS constellation, whatever it happens to be, is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation. That's really trippy to think about. The cosmic microwave background radiation is actually the encrypted communication of some super advanced civilization, but it gets even weirder when you consider the concept that perhaps this encrypted information is not stored within cosmic background radiation, but is actually encoded into you, that you are the encrypted storehouse

of some kind of super advanced civilization and that all you need is a key to unlock this encryption so that you could uncompress all the data stored within your being and that that key can be found in a variety of different ways, including meditation practices, psychedelics, or some unknown method that we haven't even stumbled upon yet or that was lost after the last great cataclysm. Terrence McKenna was one of the primary disseminators of the concept that mushrooms were in fact an alien communication, a kind of alien probe, and here's a clip from one of his lectures where he's talking about this. As you know, the world's largest radio telescope is at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and as you probably know, a multi-million channel analyzer has been attached

to that thing, and there's been funding for another deep space search, and so there they are at Arecibo with the world's largest radio telescope reaching out, you know, mega-marubish dicks into the universe. When you actually go there, the telescope was built into a natural bowl which they made further, they rounded out, and then they planted grass in this bowl to halt erosion. Well then to keep the grass from getting out of hand, they brought in white cows to crop the grass, so there in the grass beneath the world's largest radio telescope engaged in searching for extraterrestrial life is the mushroom in great profusion. If you wanted it, that's where you'd go and get it, and that is the perfect symbol for how we search for extraterrestrial life. It's at your feet,

my friends. Shit, maybe it's not at your feet, maybe it is your feet. This is McKenna's version of the Sufi parable of Nasrudin and the donkey. Nasrudin was this trickster figure who, as the story goes, as the parable goes, would ride a donkey across the border every day, and the border guards knowing Nasrudin was a mischievous trickster would search the bags on the donkey's back, and all they would find is straw, and they couldn't figure out what was happening, but they knew Nasrudin was smuggling something day after day after day. He'd come across on a donkey all the while getting wealthier and wealthier until finally he retired in some nice house in some other country, and he ran into the customs officer who was always given him the

patdown, and the customs officer said to Nasrudin, you got to tell me, Nasrudin, what was it you were smuggling? And Nasrudin said, I was smuggling donkeys. So maybe the aliens, like Nasrudin, are hiding their communication in plain sight, and the way they're hiding their information in plain sight is not by encoding it into cosmic microwave background radiation, but inside of you. Maybe human life is just encrypted alien information, and the pursuit of self-realization is that encrypted alien information trying to decode itself. Holy Jehovah, we've got a great episode today with artist Jim Woodring. We're going to dive right into it, but first some quick business. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the

weblords at Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan to get 10% off a sleek, beautiful, glistening, glorious, phosphorescent website that's guaranteed to carry your ideas into the minds of your species and transform the planet that you're currently existing on if whatever the information is that you're trying to get out there is the kind that transforms planets. If not, at least it's a great web service that's going to allow you to avoid the dark pseudo web designers that clitter and clatter in the dark corners of this wonderful civilization that we're currently existing in. These sons of bitches will destroy you if you're not careful. They will suck you into a kind of deadly undertow, and before you know it,

you're going to wake up in the middle of the night with the narcotics secreting man boob of your pseudo web designer shoved into your mouth spraying his mucusy spray into the back of your throat. This is bad news, friends, because once you suckle at the nipple of a pseudo web designer, you're going to get narcotized. You're going to get sedated. You're going to get mentally disabled. You're going to have a brain that looks like the rotting great brain of a football player and his fifties who's had hundreds of concussions all from suckling that dark nectar known as the tsunami. It's the spray of darkness that comes from these bastards who will take your idea for your business, who will take your dreams, who will take whatever budget that you have to get

your business out there on the internet, and they will transform it not from lead into gold, but from epiphany into diarrhea. And the next thing you know, you're going to have this stinky crap website sticking into the worldwide web, and anyone who goes to it is going to take one look and say to themselves, there's no fucking way that I'm going to work with this son of a bitch. Their website looks like pictures I've seen on the internet of dog cysts. You don't want that. And to avoid it, all you got to do is go to squarespace.com. You don't even need a credit card to sign up. You can check it out to make sure that it's right for you, but they've got some amazing features. It's a beautiful design. It's simple and powerful. They've got 24 seven support

via live chat and email. I have tested this to make sure that that is the case because when you're building a website, it is nice to have someone that you can reach out to. If you get confused, it's only $8 a month and you get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for the year. They've got a responsive design, your website scales to look great on any device, and every website comes with a free online store. Start a trial, no credit card is required. You can start building your website today and definitely use the offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the podcast because Squarespace has been one of my longest sponsors and they're real sweeties over there. So if you've been thinking about building a website,

give it a try. If for whatever reason it doesn't work out for you, you have nothing to lose. You can sign up for free. You don't have to use a credit card and you could just test the waters, but I guarantee you're going to like it. There's a lot of beautiful websites out there that have been created using Squarespace. Squarespace, start here, go anywhere. Speaking of you going places, I've got some upcoming tour dates that I wanted to let you know about. For those of you living in Australia, I'm going to be in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland. These dates are going to be from November 4th to November 12th. I hope you guys will come out and see me. I'm also going to be in Atlanta at the Laughing Skull,

October 15th through the 18th. All of these ticket links are up at DuncanTrussell.com. Come out and see a live show. Also, I hope you'll visit our shop located at DuncanTrussell.com. Pick up some t-shirts. A poster or one of our amazing banners. They're all there for you. I want to thank all of you who continue, amazingly continue to use our Amazon portal. If you go to the comments section of any of the podcasts at DuncanTrussell.com and click on that portal, the next time you're going through Amazon, we'll get a very small percentage of whatever it is that you buy. I'm going to promote something here that you can get through Amazon that I recently bought. It was one of those things, as I'm buying it, I'm like, this is an impulse buy. I'm fucking

up. I know that I probably shouldn't pay this much money for it. I was feeling really weird, but I did it anyway. I bought a big green egg, which is this convection oven grill thing. My god. I can't even explain how much I love this thing. The combination of this grill with marijuana and wood chips is just, it's way better. I used to think one of the, one of my favorite things to do would be to get high and play the synthesizer, which is psychedelic and lots of fun. And maybe it's just because now I'm a 41 year old old man. This is just what we like. I'll tell you, getting stoned and grilling, throwing in wood chips and playing with the vents on my convection oven grill that looks like some kind of green spaceship.

It really is one of my favorite things on earth. Slathering barbecue sauce on, watching the, watching how hot the thing instantaneously gets. You can cook pizza on the thing. I'm not sponsored by them, but if you are for whatever reason in the market for a grill, even though summer is over, go get a big green egg through the Amazon portal. It's wonderful. It really is. It makes you feel good for some reason to cook with fire, plugs into some deep primordial, genetic part of whatever it is that we are. I don't know. Maybe it doesn't at all, but it's a blast. So thank you guys who use the portal and you bookmark the portal and thank you to all of you who continue to donate to the show and thank you to all of you who continue to listen. I've

been trying to get today's interview to happen for a little over a year. I made a list some time ago of the top 10 people I'd like to interview on this podcast and on that list was Jim Woodring. Jim Woodring is an artist who creates the Frank comics. If you have been so unfortunate as to have never come into contact with Frank or the UNIFACTOR, I invite you to go to your local comic bookstore or go on Amazon and order any of the Frank books immediately. They're the most beautiful, psychedelic, incredible works of art and storytelling that I've ever come across in my life. And after reading through the Frank comics, I started looking into Jim Woodring and was delighted to find that he was as mystical as his creation. And so about a year ago, I reached out to him.

We weren't able to pull the interview off because he is a busy, wildly successful artist, but a few weeks ago I reached out to him again and he gave me the honor of this interview that you're about to hear. Go visit his website at JimWoodring.com and I command you to immediately go to Amazon.com or one of your local comic book shops and pick up as many copies of the Frank comics that you can find. They're going to help you decode the alien language that is wound up inside your very being. Now everyone please get those pineal glands engorged and squirt some of your sweet astral nectar in the direction of today's guest, artist, and visionary Jim Woodring. Thank you so much for being on the show. I've been looking forward to this. I think

I've been trying to get an interview with you for about a year now and I really appreciate you taking the time to have a conversation with me. Well thanks Duncan and I wasn't trying to avoid you. If it seemed that way I apologize. It's been a hectic year for me and it's been hard for me to do anything outside my normal routine. You've been working really hard. You've been spending some time working on the upcoming 3D Frank book? Oh that's done. That's in the bag. That's coming out later this year. So what were you working on this year? Well for one thing I moved and that was a huge upheaval. Other than that I've just been doing what I ordinarily do drawing and painting and doing comics and trying to figure out how to produce something that somebody will want

enough to give me some money for so I can continue to do it. Right. I'm sorry I'm going to start off on a sentimental note here and I hope you'll forgive me for it and maybe I'll cut it out because it's kind of sentimental. But man so in 2013 my mom was dying and I was doing stand-up and somebody at one of my shows brought me the portable Frank and I'd never seen Frank before and so I got this really cool graphic novel your graphic novel and I remember putting my suitcase and I didn't think much of it I didn't read it so I didn't you know I just had this thing that I could look at at some point but anyway my mom passed away and for whatever reason I pulled out that book and I gotta tell you I don't know what it is but something about the Unifactor and Frank meeting me in this intense

moment in my life has created an infinite connection with your art and I just want to thank you for it. Well thank you for saying that that's a remarkable story and needless to say it warms my heart to hear it thanks very much. Cool man I was hoping that maybe you could just for the folks listening who might not be familiar with your work if you could explain who Frank is. You know that's really a tall order one of the big problems that I have is when I meet people and they ask what I do and I say I'm a cartoonist that is a big turn off to most people and I'm in a hurry after that to say that I'm actually a worthwhile cartoonist that I do work that adults can look at and enjoy that I do work that is appealing to

seekers out of mystery and aficionados of dark corners and what might be hiding in them and also people who share an interest which just a second please people who share an interest in some sort of personal investigation into what is actually going on here. Yes. Because the driving spirit behind the Frank comics I guess you could say and it's also the the main work of my life to a to a real extent my to a real extent is that even a phrase to a large extent my work is a reflection of my personal ethos and my I hate to use this phrase but my life's path and my work combined very closely and they have frequently informed and influenced each other so all that is by way of saying that I'm not trying to be an entertainer

I'm not trying to be although I guess I am in a certain way because if my work isn't on some level entertaining nobody will buy it but I'm not trying to be an entertainer and I'm not trying to produce a hit series or anything like that I'm trying to express how I feel about the world. It feels to me like you're some kind of I'm going to amplify it even more it feels like you're some kind of visionary prophet that these the the Frank books gave me the same feeling I get when I read the Bhagavad Gita it's the same kind of sense of the contact with some transcendent message that needs to be decoded or and can't totally be decoded that's what I love about it is you know I can go to the Bhagavad Gita I can open it up to any passage and I can spend all day

long thinking about that particular passage and forgive me I don't mean to sound like I'm blowing too much smoke here but I can go to the Frank books they're parables you know there's some kind of mysterious parable that I won't pretend to understand completely but it fills me with that same sense of I'm in deep water here do you do you feel like you're channeling this stuff? Well first of all let me say you know that I I too am a big fan of the Bhagavad Gita I keep a copy around and I pick it up and look at it at odd moments just just to see with what what I read at that moment will tell me and it's always something that is the book of books and as far as what I do go is I guess I may as well just come right out and say something which I'm reluctant to say which

is that I think I am a mystic yes for sure not which is not the same as being a prophet or a seer or a wise man or a holy man or anything like that a mystic is there's lots and lots of mystics and mystics are simply people who are attuned to the mystical or the occult or the arcane or whatever it is you want to call it I definitely have that that orientation and I've had it my whole life and it has if I could have handled it better it would have been great but it's actually caused me a certain amount of grief because I haven't really known how to see or handle or harness this runaway interest in the hidden realm well this is isn't this a relatively one of the what one of the pitfalls they say that happens to people who get afflicted with those kinds of

predilections is that because you've gained access to whatever this energy source is it can I mean it it drives people and say it can drive you crazy like you can lose your mind completely and uh because whatever the power line is that you've managed to grab it's alive and uh sometimes it's not so merciful with people how how has it how do you feel it's negatively impacted your life well only socially only by making me um sufficiently confused by not only the world but my own reactions to it that it made me not exactly antisocial but socially out of step with the world around me if I had I grew up in a very conservative environment in southern california among people who had zero interest in this kind of thing religious conservative or

well politically conservative glendale california lily white yes dullsville you know yep and uh it's uh if I'd known somebody who if they saw me struggling with this stuff had said at that time for example oh you should read the bogg about gita or you should pick up a book on shri ramana maharshi or shri ramakrishna or anybody who could have made me realize that there was a codified world of approaches to this kind of thing i would have been a lot better off but as it was i was just a square pegging around whole and all i felt was different and weird and definitely unappreciated but also unaccepted this is one of the big downfalls of incarnating in the west isn't it is that you you if you're born into a family that isn't

familiar with the symbol systems available in a lot of the eastern scriptures and eastern mythologies you you will feel completely lost because no one in glenn i mean i'm sure people in glendale have the maps but i know that i mean when i for the i have a very similar story when i was growing up i i didn't come into contact with that information until i was in high school or so and then once you find it you're always oh this is it this is it but when did you come into contact with the those kinds of scriptures or philosophies for the first time the first time you know i can't even really say i remember when i was a little kid my folks who were not particularly religious thought that i should go to sunday school and that was okay with

me because i heard that you learned about god in sunday school and that appealed to me but when i was actually there i didn't really learn anything about god i learned about Jesus in so much as he was watching over us and very worried about our sinful ways yes and i learned about daniel and the lion's den and the jawbone of the ass and the walls came tumbling down and all this crap i didn't care about i wanted to hear about you know mysterious things i wanted to hear about god and i can see how people who are born into a christian tradition who want to go beyond it can find it very difficult to do that because christian mysticism is actually very pretty deep yes there are lots of great christian mystic scriptures but they're not people don't they're

not up front people aren't saying you've got to read this it'll show you the path to god what are some examples of those of those mystics oh um uh meister eckhart maybe or meister eckhart the imitation of christ by st jonathan crossed confessions of st augustine right things like that that's some heavy stuff that's to me and that's the real christianity to me that's the real deal that's the that's it everything else seems kind of just like the very very surface level of this incredibly deep fractal well i think that most people most people the overwhelming majority of people are not i don't know this is going to sound like an insult but i can't think of any other way to say it they're not really cut out for religion a serious serious religious practitioner

is rare a serious a person who really takes the religious seriously from the standpoint of devoting lonely hours to sitting in meditation and contemplation and to trying to you know change their characters so that they can change their minds so that they can purify their mind in all those vedantic things um i forget how i started that sense but if people who really want to do that are not all that common have you done that i have worked at it i don't you know you said something earlier about how about how do i cope having access to these thoughts i don't really i have an interest in them and i have a practice which brings me slowly incrementally closer to understanding i can feel that but i don't have any kind of religious authority

whatsoever i just have enough interest in it to express that interest in a way that is intriguing at least to me can you talk a little bit about your practice well i can i can say that you asked me when the first time i saw a scripture was you know when i started realizing that there were answers out there i started trying to find them and i found the Hare Krishna version of the Bhagavad Gita the Bhagavad Gita as it is yep it's very Christian in its emphasis on punishment for your wicked ways right and i didn't care for that although i love the paintings especially the woman boiling an oil for cooking a chicken oh my gosh or the one where the guy i i yeah the cooking a chicken lady's good the sleeping bear was that in yours like i don't recall the sleeping

bear oh it's a good one it's if you sleep too much you'll incarnate as a bear and it's this it shows like a woman sleeping and then underneath i guess is this kind of depressed looking bear that i guess that's her next life uh and then um there was the butcher a butcher who's like got a cow's head really trippy fundamentalist christian style hinduism in that book for sure yeah yeah i like that and they take the hindu cosmology very seriously his his divine grace a c bhaktivedanta whatever his name was Swami Prabhupāda yes he was uh you know he was he those books i maybe even that book i mean he talks about the the sour milk sea and this all that you know all that kind of stuff which is maybe interesting and maybe not but certainly irrelevant if what you're trying to do is

meditate well right i mean isn't that the uh you know it's interesting i just had a Hare Krishna Swami on the last episode and um you know very wonderful wonderful purse beautiful beautiful guy chanting Hare Krishna is just incredible you know and and i remember when i came into contact with the Hare Krishna's i didn't know that there that bhakti yoga or that mantra is way older than the international society for Krishna consciousness and it was really exciting to realize oh there's all these other forms of bhakti out there not just the fundamentalist stuff that you see in the Bhagavad Gita as it is but that fixation on the minutia of hindu mythology can be really annoying and i actually have been to vrindavan in india and i can remember watching these monks and robes

getting into a rather heated argument over some obvious mythology or like what you're saying you know like like what would the composition of that ocean be or what would it feel like in your hand like stuff like that where it seems to be at first glance missing the point but this Hare Krishna that i interviewed the way he put it is all of that stuff is designed as a meditation to take up all your thought processes you know you're sort of surrendering all of your thought processes into this what i would consider to be pretty absurd symbolism but from that you can hit some kind of transcendent platform i guess well that makes perfect sense and it's obviously just exactly the right path for some people right it's not mine and i know that you know all the things that i believe

in and think about and and meditate on and and questionably the Hare Krishna mantra is a great one to chant it's a wonderful use of your time but the things that i that that makes sense to me and which makes so much sense that they they constitute a superior reality are just so much nonsense to my friends i don't know anybody really outside of the people who are i know we're connected to Vedanta and they are not in my normal circle of friends i don't know anybody who is interested in the stuff that i'm in this in this religious stuff yeah and they think you know i i don't ever talk about it but on the occasions where it comes up and i do talk about it they think i'm crazy for believing in this stuff it seems as childish and as stupid to them

as the idea of you know the virgin birth or infant damnation does to me oh so you're saying when you come into contact with christians and they hear that you have no no i'm talking about secular people like what is an example of some of your beliefs that they take issue with well they just take issue with the whole thing they don't like it they don't like religion and i can understand why they don't like religion if you don't feel the call and all you see averse of religion is what it does in the world it's perfectly natural to hate it think it's a maligned force that is doing infinitely more harm than good i you know sometimes i wonder if that's a force field intentionally placed there to keep to filter people out because it seems like what that's

doing is it's filtering out people who see things only on the surface and it's this really kind of genius mechanism isn't it because it's what ends up happening is all these people look at the surface level of the thing and yeah if you look at the surface level you watch the news and you allow that to take up your entire to make the you take up your entire view of what religion is and yeah why would you want to bother with it it's some kind of miserable life destroying thought corrupting ultimately violent waste of your incarnation but man it sure isn't that's not what it is at all and i it's always i know what you mean it's very frustrating when you realize people don't want to push through that membrane and just go just allow themselves to

suspend their disbelief in the same way they do when they watch a star wars movie no but i think i think you have to feel inwardly there has to be some part of you that says that responds when you hear something that is always looking and when it hears something that's true and that resonates it picks up on it and it wants to get closer to it right i always feel that like for me one of the distinctions is people will go out in the wilderness and they'll see some awe-inspiring thing and they'll feel a sense of holiness they'll feel a connection to to cosmos they'll feel uh you know overwhelming awareness of how fantastic and beautiful the universe is but some of us instinctively get down in our knees and say you're fantastic

watch me i want to know you better i i i see i get it bring me in deeper i want to go forward you this is a fantastic billboard you've got here what are you advertising exactly show me show me bring me in wow and you you when you start looking into how you have to do that you realize the meaning behind all these words the idea of renunciation is appalling to most people yes but if you look at it in the context of what it means in order to have a spiritual life it means that you have to train your mind not to be absorbed in the real world you have to teach your mind to regard it as something to be scorned something that's not important something that gets in the way something that has to be dealt with but you renounce it in the same way you know renounce

cigarettes if you're quitting smoking you say i've got to stop doing this because i want this higher thing that i can get from quitting this and it's so hard to do and people have to do it gradually and they it takes i mean what you know how many decades does it take for a person typically to get anywhere solid through meditation well and that to me has always been something very frustrating uh and something i wonder about that that idea that the process takes years and years and years because you hear these stories especially in zen of people like you know a drop of water hits a puddle and bam they wake up or you know you hear these varying stories but yeah as someone who has a predilection to laziness i just hate that idea that yeah this just like anything else in

the world takes years and years and years to accomplish yeah yeah well that can be daunting but you know there's the parable of the the master who has two students and they say how long will it take me to attain enlightenment the master points to an enormous tamarin tree in full bloom and he goes it'll take you as many years as there are leaves on that tree as many lives yeah it's on that tree and the one disciple goes oh my god that'll take forever and the other one goes really that's all that's so cool it's just a matter of perspective right right because the more you're fixated on this life and the more you're fixated on the minutiae of this life then of course a tree filled with leaves that represent incarnations is going to seem enormous but if you recognize

that we're all an an infinite consciousness that isn't really in the time space continuum it's just confused by it or fixated on it then yeah that's nothing big deal and and just being told oh your journey is finite there will be an end to it by an authority that you respect that would be a huge comfort for for someone who is you know looking at it in that way right yeah that another thing about this that's interesting to me is how i i know people who have gotten onto the path and never deviate and have become monk like in there or actual monks but i've never been that way i'm a real my mind is very very squirrely like i think most peoples are and the experience of getting into a practice and sitting in meditation and being into it for reasons you cannot say

and getting results which are very slight but you know them when they happen because they belong to a different order of experience if you know there's that there's something that happens to people who meditate fairly early in the game usually called you know experiencing the white light when that happens to people and it happens in varying degrees it's a sign because it's not light and it's not like anything you've ever experienced is a kind of radiance and it's accompanied by a kind of soul warmth and you say oh this is this is an emissary from that country i want to go to this is off the spectrum of normal human experience my mind has gotten just a tiny bit refined and as a result it's experiencing this very slight awareness of something transcendental

does stuff like that ever make you want to put on the brakes no no no never i think i think uh one of the things about meditating is that uh it's the only experience i've ever had where it does not contain a duality with it within itself where it wasn't good and bad at the same time it was only good you know like you can something's delicious you're hungry and eat a cookie it's great you eat 20 of them and you feel sick right or if you uh you meet a girl and you're crazy about her and you have this fantastic relationship usually it isn't long before things start to go south and that love turns into a torment right unless you learn how to be selfish and change your self less and change your perspective and do things

differently if you just fall in love and don't do anything but try to have that love forever it'll turn into a nightmare that's right but you can meditate day in and day out if you have the the strength and it doesn't turn bad it doesn't turn into something unpleasant your mind may get tired your your body may rebel but you never feel like god i overdid it now i feel sick i had too much it's always good oh yeah right there's no meditation hangovers no yeah and there's no there's no sense that you've you've pushed it past the point where it was good there's only the sense that you haven't gone far enough deep into it to experience more good which you would like you never hear about people getting dragged into mental hospitals because they meditated too much and

there's no meditators anonymous of people who aren't equipped meditating no but there are people who have injured their minds by uh by practicing incorrectly by doing pranayama wrong or something people hurt themselves by doing skull shining and and you know bellis breathing and that kind of stuff what is skull shining skull shining is it's a form of pranayama very intense it's kind of like hyperventilating but it's uh it's uh it's one of those things they exhort you to do very very carefully and i know people who have had psychotic episodes that they never recovered from from doing that who is who has taught you this stuff do you have an active teacher i do i do i have a an affiliation with shri ramakrishna and i have a uh a teacher if you want to use that word who is a

senior monk of the ramakrishna order a venerable man let's just call him that who is my uh my guide you say let's just call him that because it's not quite a man right it's more he's a man he's a man you know the there's there's a word guru which is i don't think understood and maybe best not used in uh casual conversation right which you and i are not necessarily having but since this is for oh i don't wear people on this people don't know what a guru is a guru a real guru bonafide guru is the single most important connection you will ever have with a human being in your life more important you can love you more than your parents were capable of he can help you more than anybody else can and he has your

interests at heart in a selfless way that is beyond the capacity of any normal human being yeah and you don't i mean it's a very rare thing to come into contact with a guru like that's a that's considered to be a very auspicious and very good karma not everybody gets that in a lifetime well i i have a feeling that everybody who should get it gets it you know they say that the the three great blessings are to be born as a human being to be born with uh an appetite for uh you know uh religion and to meet your teacher they say that's that's that's the trio of auspicious things that can happen to a person who's interested in spiritual life right and there's a fourth thing which i think uh is essential and that is to be a very good aspirant if you want to get the most

out of it and i'm not one of the things that really intrigues me is how my meditation over the years has been very very spotty i'll do it i'll really get into it i'll really think i'm going places i will be going places and then the desire to do it just leaves me and sitting in front of the altar is a trial yes and i just get up and i go away and i i feel all charged up i'm very light i'm very feeling very good i've got tons of good energy and eventually that dissipates and i end up crawling back and sitting in front of the altar again and going oh god how do i do this again what is it i'm trying to do and it comes back and i think why did i ever leave this and that's happened to me so many times during the course of my life and i think it's common i think that's much more common

than being uh an ever perfect as Sri Ramakrishna called him somebody who is born to be a renunciate born without a strong libido born without a strong attachment attachment to the world born with the intellectual capability to look around at the world at sea of an early age that it never satisfies yeah even in the long terms to say nothing impermanently yeah those guys are boring i like i think they're they may be boring but they're they've they've got it going on i they got a i mean boring in the sense i'm being a player hater oh yeah well that's it that's it and they are people can't see them yeah well don't people you know people look at people generally speaking they're invisible to the world because they aren't making noise and making waves not

interested they're not interested and and i'm fascinated you know i love thinking about them because uh when you consider it sort of societally this crazy hierarchy that we have in society and popular culture uh you know like the we've have this spectrum of celebrity or fame and i don't know if you you probably do use instagram no so instagram is this i love it it's this ridiculous thing where people post pictures and if you if you fall a taylor swift on instagram then what you're gonna get is a lot of pictures of her pre-show sort of taking pictures of the massive arena that she's about to perform in and then pictures of the arena while she's performing just countless people just a impossible to imagine almost like adolf hitler levels swarm of people

watching her and you see she's the nucleus of this incredible organism that's formed around her so taylor swift you could say is on the very end of the spec this weird spectrum of fame but what you're talking about these people these non these people who aren't stirring up the sediment of culture but are a million times more potent than a taylor swift i love thinking about how far does that spectrum go and where are they how are they spending their time what are their interests here why did they come here why do you think they even came here at all that's that's a question i can't answer one of the things that really uh took me a while to get my mind around when i met my teacher was uh when he when he initiated me he said okay our relationship

will be teacher and student and i said good and i didn't really realize what that meant he isn't interested in hearing what i have to say about anything unless i'm asking him a question or trying to clarify some spiritual point he doesn't give up he doesn't give a hoot about my artwork or my situation at home or what i saw on the street or a joke that i've heard or my my thoughts about vedanta all he does is tell me things and he is such an authority that every he doesn't utter an unconsidered or wasteful syllable and the instruction can be really dry and it really frequently isn't what i want i grew up reading lush exciting things like uh you know be here now or the books of ellen watts and things that really tried to kind of put their arm around you and

bring you into this field of thought but a real teacher at least uh when i've encountered doesn't do that at all he has information and he wants me to understand it and there are no frills no wasted time no social niceties whatsoever but everything he says is intended to bring me closer to the goal and he's got the insight he's got so much insight and so understanding that his words have power and if he tells me to sit down and say a certain mantra that has a lot of meaning and the doing of it will get different results than if somebody else told me to do that and i sat down and tried it there's a connection there that is incomprehensible and sometimes i will find myself you know i'll pull back from this a little bit and i'll go what am i actually doing

here i can say that i feel i have a connection with shri ramakrishna i feel it what does that even mean where did this connection come from did i know i'm in a past life are we connecting on the astral plane or whatever i don't know what that even means i don't know what any of this stuff means but i'm dancing to the tune that it's calling because it is far and away not only the only thing in my life that makes sense but the only thing in my life that seems worth doing everything else is just cyclical wheel spinning time killing you know the road to superannuation it doesn't get me anywhere drugs don't get you anywhere art doesn't get you anywhere romantic love doesn't get you anywhere wow contemplation and meditation and trying to purify your mind so that it can

understand transcendental things that gets you somewhere do you know the story there it's a harikrishna story about the dog that has no teeth have you heard that story before i don't think so it sounds sad it's really sad and it's a comparison to people who think you can achieve pleasure in the material universe from gratifying the senses but the idea is there's a dog in a village with no teeth and it's found a dry bone and it's chewing on the dry bone with its gums and the dry bone is cutting its gums so it's tasting its own blood and it keeps chewing on the bone because it's confused drinking its own blood with eating food oh that's amazing isn't that cool and that's the comparison for what everyone's doing here which is that they are trying they're eating plastic fruit

so to speak yeah yeah well there's a similar terrible in the Ramakrishna tradition different but similar in a certain way which is that a camel one of the camel's favorite foods evidently is a kind of thorny plant and it hurts it to eat it the thorns hurt its mouth and it's it bleeds while it's eating it but it won't stop doing it right and i you know that's something i i certainly see in my own life and in the lives of people around me we just we're drawn to make the same mistakes over and over again to suffer in the same way again and it's interesting to contemplate why it is that happens what is it about what is it about this world that is so alluring that we're we're determined to squeeze pleasure out of it over and over again even though we know that it always ends

in tears what is the and contrary wise why is it that for me at least it can be so if i'm in them if i'm in the in the zone and meditating is a complete pleasure but that zone eventually goes away and i cannot get into it and i wonder why is that what what is it in me that is holding up a hand and saying stop no more meditation it's time to go out and smoke pot and overeat and get in trouble somehow you know yes it's like i don't know why i have to keep taking these these vacations for my practice just to wallow like a pig in the filth of the world but i do help it and i'm i know and i think it's because the pleasures of spiritual living at least at the stage that i'm in are so subtle and so i don't quite trust them if i'm if i'm meditating well

and living well and controlling my mind i feel good but it's a very placid kind of well-being now what i want is to take lsd or something and have some mind-blowing experience right hard for me to be satisfied with just feeling calm and a low-level peace well you know maybe the experience the reason you're doing it is because you really enjoy that feeling when you come back to the practice and maybe that's your version of that explosive thing because there's a you know Sharon Salzburg the buddhist teacher no i don't she's pretty great but she's got a saying the healing is in the return and that it's the that moment that when you go when you leave your practice and you experience all the confusion and stagnation that comes from being disconnected from a practice

and then suddenly you're sitting again and you get that first what you described is why did i ever stop doing this it's incredible maybe that's what we like maybe it's that i don't know maybe there you know it's like the child running away from its mom and then coming back again there's a kind of bliss in that moment when you come back to it yeah definitely but there's also a certain bliss in the moment where you decide okay i've been meditating long enough i've been a good boy long enough i mean when the thrill goes away there's nothing there's nothing i don't have the discipline and i think that's i think the real difference is that a really deep really naturally spiritually endowed person will sit at that altar every day whether they feel like it or not right they may

also have the the inherent blessing of not having a ranging desire to get high or get later whatever it is that pulls me away from the practice well do you think jim that it's possible that there is no escape from the altar some people say that the getting laid getting high gratifying the senses if approached from the right with the right intention becomes as valid a method as meditating yeah yeah well i i is that true i mean it may be true for some people people i've known who did that and they were a sort of autodiadactic tantrics were assholes and i don't want to be you know it doesn't strike me as being a very good thing i i i haven't pulled it off i i can't i mean there's i think you could be maybe a you know i you would have to be a i don't know it's it's

like an amphibious creature so i you'd have to i don't know how you go into that place and maintain any kind of lucidity at all i can't i the moment that i go away from a practice for any given amount of time i i've become comatose i'm just an ambient sleepwalker i don't know what's happening i just stumble around until i'm lucky enough that i'm sitting again well you know on the one hand there are you know paths like that you know extreme tantra or agora you know they're not my paths they're interesting to me but they don't excuse me they don't resonate with me and i can just tell they're not for me oh gosh drinking out of a skull cream that a few that idea appeals to me although i can't touch wine but we're sitting on a corpse in the cemetery i mean i like that

idea now but the whole burning gap you know yeah i like that and i guess you had an opportunity to do that when you were in benares i saw it i didn't have an opportunity to do it but i saw have you ever been to india no i never have oh you gotta go man you gotta go you go to varanasi my friend and i we went out to we were in india and in varanasi the city of shiva they uh because it's shiva city shiva drinks eats marijuana so marrow you can get marijuana there is a sacrament and we you know everyone had been telling us when you get to varanasi order a bong lassi and uh you know college kids didn't really think about it at all ordered a bong lassi at our hotel drank it then got on a boat on the ganji's river just as the marijuana was kicking in and talk about getting your ass kicked

by god just like what did you think you were doing like you you are now on this most sacred river on earth in the city of the what they call the city of burning and learning because it's just everyone's getting cremated there yeah and it was amazing and you see these shivites in the water ringing bells and smoke is rising up from bodies being cremated and people are dancing around the bodies being cremated chanting and monkeys are running on the rooftop and it's just another dimension you are in another dimension that's not the one we're in right now well that's i would love to go there and see something like that if i if i ever do make it to india the first place i'm going to go to is dakshina swarf to see the khali temple there i'm never what is this i've

never heard of this the khali temple addiction is you know shri ramakrishna are you aware of him i'm aware of him but i'm as soon as well i'm done with this interview i'm gonna start researching him i don't know too much about him well he was uh he was a uh a temple priest at the khali temple at dakshina swarf so he lived there and it's a place of pilgrimage for people like me so that's that's the main place that i would like to go but of course there are lots of other places in india like binaries that i would love to go to um do you how how how much of how much of this philosophy and how much of ramakrishna has made its way into the frank books well uh probably you know it's a question i can't really answer because i have to assume that

shri ramakrishna has always been there in my life and i just became aware of him on a certain point when i was about 35 so frank existed prior to your contact no no he he didn't well i guess he did i don't know frank is a manifestation of uh of uh of my own way of seeing things and before i did frank i did other work in the same vein that did also strove to express the things that frank strove but frank really turned out to be a perfect blue moon vehicle for that and i actually did the first drawing i ever did of frank very shortly after encountering shri ramakrishna so maybe he is some sort of a flowering of that i don't know wow so frank can't oh wow cool but i but i think that may be putting too much emphasis on it because i don't really think

that uh i mean i think my work is best viewed completely divorced from any anything having to do with vedanta or religion or even or anything real because what these are these are comic fables right and they're just you know by someone who is not a seer and not enlightened and they should never be taken as having any depth or serious meaning to them people who are possessed of knowledge of certain kinds of depth and meaning might find something resonating in those books that entertains them or intrigues them or in people who are at the very very beginning of their own voyage of self-discovery might respond to frank more than they respond to sunday school because there are spiritual mysteries and

parables and cosmic cause and effect and and things like that built into there oh yes i see i you know this is i it's so funny i doesn't matter if you say that i'm still gonna find deep meaning in those books whether you like it or not i love them and i it makes fine with me thank you fine with me i'm just saying that that from my point as i represented from my standpoint i cannot you know i can't say oh yeah this is these are spiritual comics these comics are full of uh you know cosmic wisdom which i have blamed and i'm sharing with you that's that's absurd i could never ever say that that's crazy well well i mean maybe it just accidentally comes out of you or maybe it's just something some of us are projecting onto it

because we want it to be there but well i i think it you know it's when i write these stories when i write a frank story i've got this criterion that i developed where and it goes back to the the earliest things i ever saw that had resonance for me you know when i was a little kid like i said i grew up in a very conservative household but i would occasionally see things that got me where i lived i would see a a Hieronymus Bosch print or i would see an illustration by Boris arts of bashif in time magazine or i would see an illustration by Pierre Roy or some other kind of illustrator whose work covered on the boundary line between secular and spiritual then i think that's those images are got something i want to

do that i want to try to make pictures that have that quality to them and it wasn't until i was in a high school that i found out about surrealism and the way i found out about it was by going to a massive surrealism and dada were at perspective at the ellie county art museum in 1968 when i was sixteen i never even heard of solvador dali and i walked place and there's all the greatest hits of dada and surrealism and the dali section which was about in the middle of the show had maybe 10 of his best and most famous paintings including the invisible man and i remember looking at the invisible man and seeing one of those flayed graddivas hanging from a plinth by her hair yeah with her face turned away from you as if in shame and that just went into my subconscious like a

bullet and exploded and i realized what could be done with art how deep it could go how scary and wrong and bad and sick and glorious it could be if you had sufficient courage to face these things and to put them down and to obviously not give a shit whether or not people thought you were crazy or wrong or perverted or anything right that was a very liberating experience it was like all these all these men and women who i hadn't know their like existed before saying yes by all means explore these mysteries all means to vote your life to this kind of thing so that was a that was a huge eye-opener for me there and when i what i realized is that there's a certain kind of frisson i get from a certain kind of work where i can it just attracts me and it holds my eye and the

analogy that i came up with to explain it to myself is that it's like fluorescence yes because you can't see fluorescent light but it makes things glow so you can tell that those rays are there by the way certain substances react and when i'm writing a frank story i will come up with ideas one after another and when i get one that has that glow to it i'll start exploring that and the ideas that i added that initial idea i don't keep them unless they have that glow also and by the end of it i've got this long-going chain of events and i don't worry about what it means or anything i just draw it up and if i'm lucky i never do discover the meaning of it until well if i'm lucky i never discovered so it never loses its punch for me over time i frequently find out what a lot of them

are about some of them are quite mundane but really mundane no kidding like how do you mean well i mean they're mundane for example there's one where there's just the whole thing can be explained by a central pun which is the relationship between the words rug and drug that's a little bit disappointing but then again drugs that's not a that's not a small subject right and neither is rugs if you want to look at it in a certain way so no rugs aren't at all griggy one thing to say that oh yeah this this book is about how uh you know uh every individual consciousness is a reflection of brahman that sounds very interesting and highfalutin and easy to contemplate but you know i that's not a message i would ever deliberately try to say i would never say you

you know you know this is an interesting idea i'll try to express this tentative vidante in my work that never occurs to me i just conjure up ideas until one of them announces its its significance by by having that glow and i i just put it in the jar and accumulate things until i can make a story out of them wow do you do you when you when you say you write the frank books or you're coming up with these potential ideas are you verbally are you are they are you writing them out as a script or you're okay yeah i write them in pencil in a notebook so you you write out frank does this or yes exactly wow cool and then if you okay and then that if that fluoresces for you then you'll start drawing it yeah if i have a complete story i will just sit down and

breaking it down drawing it up all that stuff is kind of fun but the uh you know that by the time i'm ready to sit down and actually draw it and draw those wavy lines and everything all the the fun part of it is gone and it's just worth oh wow right yes because it's so precise what you're doing uh it i could see that it's it's almost like a wood wood cutting or it's incredible um jim we only have about nine more minutes left and i've got a couple of questions from the internet for you may may i ask them i ask people if they had questions for you yeah sure okay um um i picked out two that i really love uh please ask him how he manages to so successfully stay tuned to a subconscious mind how do i i guess by trying to and by sacrificing a lot of my life

in order to do it you know when i was the things that that i think lots lots of people have all kinds of dynamic experiences when they're very young they hallucinate they experience paranoia they have a very vivid wild untamed exciting and mysterious view of the world and that gradually goes away with time because they realize that if they want to get an education get a job get married get buried they have to leave all that stuff behind because it won't help them on that quest but for me that was the only the those those feelings that intensity that was only the that was the only thing that ever mattered to me and i've worked my whole life at keeping that tunnel open and my line of sight back down through the years to those to that kind of early cauldron

experiences open and so the answer is how i do it is i work at it i've sacrificed dignity and time and a lot of other things just so that i can maintain that connection what do you mean dignity how do you sacrifice dignity in that pursuit well i guess i didn't have to but i i just ended up doing it because i was a monomaniac you know a person who you know it's like somebody is in the throes of creation they don't really care whether their hair is combed or whether they've showered or wearing their their pants are inside out they just want to they're just focused on the work and i've sort of been that way my whole life in my pursuit of the enjoyment and the slow unfolding understanding of what all this means so i haven't tried to i had never learned to quorum

i could never have gotten to finishing school i never really cared much about how i dressed and to a certain extent i never cared about how i acted and that all really worked against me in a social way can you describe your workspace well we just moved from our beloved old house in seattle's u district out to fashion island nearby and so my workspace is brand new but i have a small room that i draw in and i have a work table that goes up and down so i can stand at it or sit at it and it's got a big light table on it and that's where i do all my drawing is it true that you listen to crickets when you work no i listen to frogs and now i've got real frogs i'm surrounded by tree frogs so all they have to do is open the window but yeah i listen to recordings of frogs

and i also listen to spoken word you know you're talking about the you know during the artwork and i was saying that the right the preparing it of it is easy and the the drawing it of it is hard i can't listen to anything while i'm writing it there has to be dead silence but when i'm drawing it i just listen to spoken word and old radio shows non-stop what which spoken words what spoken word do you listen to oh books on tape uh i go to the library i just got a bunch of books on tape by david sideris i got a novel about zelda zelda fits gerald i got michael moors autobiography i got john lithko's autobiography i just burned through the stuff i just like to hear human voices talking while i work have you started if you got if you started listening to podcasts yet while you

work not to be self-promoting uh i have listened to some podcasts yes um and but no music you don't listen to music while you're working oh yeah i listen to music too i listen to loud loud classical and rock and roll music what kind of what kind of rock music do you listen to oh i still listen to nirvana an awful lot and but you know i'm not up on modern music for me the white stripes are still a new band so same here same but i like i like rock and roll i like guitars drums rhythm guitar i don't i can like yeah my son is always playing hip hop for me and you know Beyonce is great and 180 thousand is great oh there's lots of great stuff out there but what i really like is rock and roll and guitars and with music what i really like is uh i mean with

classical music what i like is lush heavy orchestral programmatic music um jim one last question a lot of folks who listen to this podcast a lot of folks listening right now are artists and maybe they they haven't had the same kind of courage you've had when it comes to allowing themselves just to go deep into whatever that soup or whatever the thing is that's coming out of you is there any kind of advice you could give them methods they could use some tech technique or tactic that they could adopt that will help them uh be more of a conduit for this kind of creative energy you're putting into the world no i don't i don't really know how to do that myself so i couldn't give anybody else any advice to it i will say that when i hear from a cartoonist who

tells me that he's going he wants to be a cartoonist and he's working at it his wife is worried about where the money's coming from so he's given himself six months or a year to succeed and if it doesn't work out he'll uh go back to whatever it was he was doing i just tell him to go back to whatever he was doing now because that attitude is is uh counter indicated for people who want to succeed the only way to succeed is to have no other options no backup plan i used to tell my wife and son when he was old enough to understand what i was saying that i was going to do this work and if we had to live in the park and sleep on bales of hey that was too bad but i had to do this work and there was no hope for it because i couldn't i couldn't do anything else not only did

i not have the skills i couldn't focus on another career while i was thinking about this one beautiful thank you so much jim i'm so grateful to you for this conversation it's just been wonderful where can people find you is there i know you have a website jim woodring website at jimwoodring.com which is sort of semi moribund better than that i have a facebook artist page great i'll have that link up at dunkintrestle.com and is do you have what you have a book coming out in december 2015 is there anything sooner than that coming out no no uh i was hoping that this book would come out sooner because there are some some events it's related to but no the 3d book is coming out in december and right now i'm working

on a new frank book which is a sequel to my previous frank book which was called fran it starts with that one left off oh god i love fran man that's that is my favorite one i can't wait to see what happens um i well i hope you like it because i think what what is going on here is interesting if there's a story structure and a literary literary device that i've never seen anywhere else before and so i'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out when can we expect it to come out i i can't even begin to say i'm still in the very early stages of working on it can't wait jim thank you so much it's just been a great pleasure thanks for being on the show thank you dunkin you're an interesting guy to talk to thank you for saying so great all right wonderful

thanks for listening everybody please be sure to go to jimwoodring.com and to buy some frank books because they're the best also big thanks to squarespace.com for sponsoring this podcast if you go to squarespace and use offer code dunkin you'll get 10 off your first order bless you guys thank you so much for listening to the show i'll see you real soon haray krishna