Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Martin Wittfooth

Episode Date: January 7, 2015

Genius artist Martin Witfooth joins the DTFH to talk about art and nature.

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to you, asking if they help you, can help you, tormenting you by trying to make you think that somehow things made out of plastic are worth $700. You can look at the glasses that are being sold at these eyeglass boutiques and no matter how blind you are, you can tell that there's no fucking way that thing costs $700 to make. It's plastic. The material that they're using to build these goddamn eyeglasses out of it, these high-priced eyeglass boutiques being run by demons who want to keep the world completely blind. You could look at this shit and tell right away that it's just, they didn't fall out of a fucking UFO. That wasn't manufactured in some underground government laboratory by Einstein. This is just something some asshole threw together

after taking ecstasy for a few days at a fountain rave and I'm supposed to pay $600 for it because it makes me feel fancy. No eyeglasses, mongers at the local malls and boutiques across America. No! Your days of ramming your reptilian fist into our poor, blind assholes have come to an end thanks to Warby Parker. If you go to warbyparker.com you can see that there is an incredible selection of awesome eyeglasses that are better than the eyeglasses that you're going to find at these eyeglass mongers doom prisons. The glasses over there start at $95, not the $600 to $1,000, however much those glasses cost over there is too much. Warby Parker, they start at $95 bucks and it's a really cool, it's a really cool man. There's this entire new business that is emerging on the

internet that is not based on trying to as much as possible extract every bit of money that they can possibly can for you while giving you a crap product in exchange for it. It's a new idea, it's a crazy idea, which is that people actually give you something that is of value and amazing for what it's worth, not a million times more than what it's worth. Warby Parker, it's one of the, it's like the uber of eyeglass companies. Here's what happens, you go to warbyparker.com, you're blind, face it. You don't need to be, here's the first thing is face that you're blind, number one, you're blind. The world's blurry right now for you, just deal with it, okay? You're disintegrating. Part of the disintegration process of your eyeballs don't work as well. Maybe you're,

you're born with wonky eyes. I, I wasn't, but I spend so much time with my eyeballs trained on my fucking cell phone, like little meaty magnets stuck on that awful attention sucker of my phone that my eyes have disintegrated and now I have to wear glasses. So number one, admit that you need glasses. Number two, go to warbyparker.com, check out these awesome glasses. They use premium Japanese titanium non-rocking screws. They're anti-reflective, I don't even know what that means, but it's badass. They're anti-reflective. Who wants to use a goddamn rocking screw? You want a rocking screw in your fucking glasses? Then go to one of these shit boutiques and give money to the reptilians. You're just going to send it directly to the military industrial complex to

be used as a bomb to be dropped on children. That's guaranteed. You don't want a rocking screw. You want a French non-rocking screw. They're anti-reflective. They have anti-glare coating and they include a hard case and a cleaning cloth. Here's what happens. They have something called a home try-on program, which is that you go to warbyparker.com. You can order five pairs of glasses. They ship the glasses directly to you. You can try them on in the comfort of your own home. That's very important because when you're trying on glasses at a store, when you're trying on clothes at a store, it's an innately existentially embarrassing situation because you're forced to do your hidden poses in front of other people. Whereas if you

get these glasses, you can be alone. You can look at the mirror yourself in the mirror and get all the angles, all the angles. See what you look like from all the hidden secret angles and your secret poses and find out if these glasses work for you. They send you a prepaid return shipping label. You send them all back, place an order for your prescription glasses and you'll get glasses in your hands within 10 business days. Often they come faster than that. For every pair of glasses they sell, they give a pair of glasses to a poor blind person. That's way better than down at the country club where you were thinking about going where that asshole whose skin is soaked in stem cells and overpriced perfume made out of baby whales is going to rip you off and send you back

into the street with maybe better vision but a broken heart. Warby Parker will not break your heart or your wallet. They're going to send some really cool glasses to you. You're going to try them on in front of your, you can have a party, invite all your friends and your family over, invite your probation officer over and you can try these on. You know in the old days if you had one of those probation bans on your legs, forget it if you were going to get glasses, you're doomed. If you're somebody who's under house arrest, Julian Assange, if you're listening to this, you can get your glasses refilled without having to go to a store. It's warbyparker.com. Glasses are important. They make you, a nice pair of glasses will make you look cooler than you

do without them on. I love my glasses. I don't wear them all the time and to be honest I lost them about a month ago so I've got to go back to Warby Parker and get some glasses but for the brief amount of time that I do have glasses and I get to exist in a universe where I'm no longer blind as somebody who is living too close to Chernobyl, it's a beautiful universe. It really is. If you've been, if you're one of those people like me who's been avoiding glasses for a while, it's pretty nice to suddenly see letters clearly. It's pretty awesome. You get glasses starting at $95 including the lenses. They also have reading glasses, sunglasses and you can find out everything you need to find out about Warby Parker simply by going to warbyparker.com forward slash family hour.

Go there, buy some of their glasses, try it out. I give them a full endorsement. They create really awesome beautiful glasses and they're disrupting a market and that's pretty awesome to me. So don't be blind anymore. You don't need to be broke. If you've been putting off beginning glasses because you feel like you can't afford them, put it off no longer. It's very simple. Within a few days you can be trying on glasses and a few days more you can be no longer blind and have some extra money that you can spend on acid or massages or I don't know incense cones, whatever it is that you want. Spend that extra glass money on incense cones. Go to warbyparker.com forward slash family hour and try them out. Support them. They support this podcast. Okay, let's get going.

Didactic spirituality alert. Didactic spirituality alert. I'm about to talk about the present moment and meditation for about 20 minutes. If you don't want to listen to that kind of nonsense, yeah, from a crystal gazing stone or hippie, jump ahead 20 minutes right into the interview and you can listen to me talk about the same kind of stuff with an artist. Hello, my dear sweet children of the night. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast returning from a brief holiday hiatus where I allowed myself to sink into a miasmic ooze of entropic nothingness, just laying in bed, watching movies, playing video games, playing Hearthstone, drinking too much, sucking back unholy amounts of

hash tincture and generally just allowing myself to slide into a low level state of pure laziness. So my apologies to you. I think it's good to do those things from time to time to allow yourself, if you can, to disregard all responsibilities, to be as irresponsible as you possibly can without wrecking or destroying your entire life. If you can pull it off, you should do it. This is something that Charles Bukowski talked about. I'll just play it for you. I have periods where, you know, I feel a little weak or deep for after. Fuck it, the Wheaties aren't going down right. I just go to bed for three days and four nights, pull down all the shades and just go to bed, get up, shit, just drink a beer down there and go back

to bed. I come out of that completely re-enlightened for two or three months. I get power from that. I think someday, I'll say, this psychotic guy knew something that, you know, in days of head of medicine and how to figure these things out, everybody should go to bed now and then when they're down low and just give it up for three or four days, then they'll come back good for a while. But we're so obsessed with it. We have to get up and do it, go back to sleep. In fact, there's a woman I'm living with now gets around 12, 30, 1 p.m. I say, I'm sleepy. I want to go to sleep. She says, what? You want to go to sleep? It's only 1 p.m. We're not even drinking, you know. Hell, there's nothing else to do but sleep.

People are nailed to the processes. Up, down, do something. Get up, do something, go to sleep. Get up. They can't get out of that circle. You'll see someday they'll say, but Towsky knew. Lay down for three or four days to get your juices back, then get up, look around and do it. But who the hell can do it because you need a dollar? That's all. That's a long speech, isn't it? But it means something. Let that ping-pong around in your head as you're tormenting yourself with whatever your New Year's resolutions happen to be. By the way, I'm not anti-New Year's resolutions. I've got some myself. I want to get in better shape. I want to discipline myself more. I want to meditate every

day. I want to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have all these want-us, you know. This is something Rom-Docs calls should all over yourself. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. But it's really funny. You get in a conversation with a friend about New Year's resolutions and they will start talking about all the stuff that they're going to do. That's what a New Year's resolution is. It's like, I'm going to do this. It's never I'm doing this right now. It's always like, well, I'm going to start working out. I'm going to stop drinking as much. I'm going to quit smoking. I'm going to be nicer to people. I'm going to do all this shit. What ends up happening with all these things that you're going to do is that you completely avoid what you're doing right now,

which is the exact pattern that got you into drinking or got you into smoking or got you into whatever the specific little pit that you happen to be trapped in that you're dreaming of getting out of. This is the idea that a broken machine cannot fix itself using the same process that broke it in the first place. It's a wild idea that if you're trying to make yourself a better person, then the very idea that you are not a good person now and in the future will be a better person is the idea that caused all of your problems in the first place. The very idea of a New Year's resolution can be rather satanic in the sense that you sort of come up with this idea of how you're going to be. You imagine this perfect version of yourself and then you spend the next

several weeks or months galloping in the direction of this future version of yourself while completely negating, neglecting and ignoring the being that you are now. It's the worst kind of sacrifice. It's like here is this poor version of yourself right now as you are the person who's sitting there listening to this podcast. Maybe you're washing your dog right now or snorting rails of crystal meth or you're probably, I know a lot of athletes listen to this podcast so more than likely you're probably training for football or practicing basketball. I know a lot of professional basketball players are really into this podcast. You're probably getting ready for a big game coming up or maybe you're a senator or a congressman but the point is that that you that you are right now

is the you. That's the most important you and I think what Bakowski is talking about there is just spending some time with yourself acknowledging the fact that this ridiculous self-crucifixion that we've done where we've nailed ourselves to this terrible modern pattern of existence which is a relatively brand new thing in the course of the human existence on this planet, the insane flurry of activity that we call being having a career or being successful or having dreams and all that shit. It's just something that got that projectile vomited all over us by Henry Ford. This nonsense idea of the five-day work week and the eight-hour day and all that shit. That's not real. That's something a human made up

but a lot of people think that that's like just the way humans have always been like way back in the primordial past that ancient humans woke up before the sun came up and spent eight hours doing some repetitive pattern to get symbolic items that they could then use to that they hoarded away in in holes and then eventually when they were ready they would dig those symbolic items out and give it to a person so that they could inhabit a bigger cave. That's nonsense. It never worked like that. This is a brand new thing. Sons of bitches have got slave drums in your head. You've got one of those Viking slave drummers or one of those slave ship drummers just sitting somewhere in the back of your head just pounding

away. The rhythm of your life. Wake up in the morning, make the coffee, walk the dogs, feed the kids, go to work, come back and drink and go to sleep. Whatever it is. That thing. Just in a fucking hurry all the goddamn time you know. We ever realize you're in a hurry and there's nothing that you have to be rushing for and then you just kind of realize like oh shit I'm mostly always in a hurry which is called leaning into the future. You're always kind of leaning into the future. You're always leaning towards this future version of yourself to try to stay out of the present moment. Oh I gotta get this done. Oh fuck I gotta get this done. What are you doing? Like I've found myself indexing a mirror in my house in a hurry. Like oh shit I gotta

fucking let me just get this fucking mirror clean off real quick. Why am I rushing this? Like what's waiting for me after I've indexed the mirror? Or like dishes? You know you ever find yourself in a hurry to finish the dishes? Like you're in hell? Like washing the, like you're up to your fucking neck and molten tar? I gotta get these fucking dishes done. Get these dishes done because after the dishes I don't know what I'm gonna do. That thing. I love what Bukowski's saying because it's asking you to give a middle fucking, give your middle finger to that fucking stupid idea. Oh you know you can't just take a bed vacation. If you want to take a vacation from work you're gonna, you're supposed to have a place that you're going right? That's the idea. If you

take a vacation you go to some other place. When you're at that other place you fill up the days with some kind of activity and then at the end of the vacation you're supposed to be all relaxed as opposed to what Bukowski's talking about which is like a free base level vacation. It's like forget going somewhere else. You're not gonna be, if you go somewhere else that's fine but you're still, you're still going, you're still gonna be you. The idea is spend some time completely in a state of complete rest. Unnail yourself from the ridiculous crucifix of your career. Just for a few days. Spend some time just laying in bed and farting and drinking beers every once in a while and then see what happens. Take some real guts to do that. Real

guts. That is not recommended. You're not gonna hear that on a fucking Tony Robbins CD set. He's not gonna say I gained this great wealth and success in my private helicopter and skyscrapers and a harem or a unicorn farm or whatever Tony Robbins has by sleeping for three days straight. Four days straight. I don't know maybe he does say that. He does have some great advice. I'm not asking, I'm not saying that you should just like give up the dance of modern society but take a seat on the bench from time to time. That's all. Give yourself a break. Lay in bed for three days and then come up with your New Year's resolution. Don't let your New Year's resolutions just be another part of this fever like delirium that comes from existing in a

society, a materialistic society that has completely disregarded the idea of the present moment which by the way is the most bliss-filled ecstatic place you can possibly be and which in general cannot be sweetened by the artificial sweetener that we call money or success. It's really kind of amazing if you just spend a little bit of time meditating every day. That's a stupid word. It's a boring sounding word. I wish there was a better word for it because when you hear it it just is like that's an anal clincher. That'll make you like squeeze your butt cheeks shut and shut your ears down because it really does sound horrifyingly boring, meditating but that's not what meditation is. It's really not. It's one of the most psychedelic

things that you could do because it allows you to apply the microscope of your attention to the present moment to your breath and to the workings of your body and the way your body feels and then somewhere in that process you realize that you really are existing in a world of such immediate sense gratification that it is so incredibly overwhelming that you have gotten into a pattern of doing everything you can to avoid the experience that Terence McKenna, well Terence McKenna described DMT as being a niagraous of epiphanous beauty or maybe he was talking about mushrooms. The experience of being on DMT or mushrooms a niagraous of epiphanous beauty but you know just sitting still and feeling your body for some certain period of time you begin

to realize that that niagraous of epiphanous beauty is in fact the essential state of the present moment that we are somehow situated in this out rushing a flow of experience that the universe is having that is so incredibly beautiful and exhilarating and sweet that we try to avoid it. It's too much to handle so the idea is we escape into pain. We're always in this state of trying to escape from nirvanic bliss into agony into pain somehow it's easier to be in an awful life completely numbed out and feeling like shit and tired and bored and you know everything that's gonna happen you've figured out the whole world you know where things are going you know why things happen the way they do you understand every fucking thing that awful state of knowing

everything you know or you know everything i've heard this a million times before i know what it means i know i know what happens when i meet somebody i know they're gonna go away i know what happens when this kind of guy comes around that kind of guy comes around and no happens when this means that thing you've mapped out you think you've mapped out the terrain that you're on which is what it's the worst but somehow that state of pure absolute future oriented stagnation is preferable to the truth of reality which is that you are this kind of ever expanding exponentially increasing orgasm of consciousness that for no reason at all appears to be emanating from nothingness

it's like better to not be there you know it's something about that is just wrong like if you just spend a little bit of time and just sitting still for a little while meditating is the wrong word for it they should call like bliss fishing or something something else like a form of hunting fractal surfing i don't know what the name for it is but if you just spend a little bit of time you don't have to be high and that is that idea is just a real that's infuriating for a lot of psychonauts they don't want to hear that fucking shit terence mckenna seemed to have a little bit of problem a little bit of he didn't trust the idea that meditation could lead to like supremely psychedelic states because he'd been on you know deep doses of mushrooms and experience that

version of consciousness and couldn't imagine how sitting still could produce that same kind of experience well he was right in the same way that if you sit still for a little while you're not going to suddenly be watching a fucking i max movie that's for sure you're not going to teleport into an i max theater if you if you just sit still and breathe for a little while but what will happen if you just sit still and breathe for a little while is is suddenly you will become acquainted with a version of the universe that you will more than likely immediately associate with the universe that you remember from being a child and i'll take that experience over being attacked by interdimensional elves or watching impossible

shapes form in the midst of nothingness or being overwhelmed by the incredible fractal flow of existence that seems to exist in the bardo that you enter into on dmt or mushrooms or a psychedelic any day that's i mean i'm 40 right i've been to that those dimensions many many times and i will return to them don't get me wrong but uh it's a it's an incredible thing when you begin to realize that you are sitting on top of or inside of a basically a bliss chamber this on rush of loves pounding against you at all times and you're in this weird bizarre fight to punch that shit back to push it away and that the all of society the whole pattern of society seems built on turning your back to this truth and to creating the illusion that if you make this much money

you'll experience bliss that's the weird thing about the present moment is it seems to be the antithesis of all notions of success through hard work or success through having something it seems to be this kind of weird form of communism that if everyone suddenly realized that just sitting still for a few minutes a day will create a state of happiness that the a busy billionaire could never come close to experiencing that a society would collapse but the start of that you got to have guts like bakowski did that genius alcoholic saint he just leapt into the emptiness for three three or four days courageously courageous slacking i think that's what uh maybe that's what meditation should be called from now on courageous slacking

just forget the whole idea of getting a spiritual practice and adopt that a new idea that you're going to become a courageous slacker that you're courageously going to not do anything for extended periods of time each day that's way that sounds way better than meditating that would definitely get me into it way faster than idea of meditating fuck that crystal gazer shut up about your goddamn meditation practice you asshole i'm into it right now sorry if this is what i've been yapping about so much but it's where my mind's going if i was talking about something else i'd be being dishonest even though when i talk about this i feel like i'm being dishonest because i honestly don't know too

much about it but it is where my mind is landing at this very moment so forgive me those of you out there who wish that i was doing more like comedy centric or whatever whatever the podcast were 10 episodes ago this is where my head's at now so this is where i'm going to this is what i'm going to yap about okay so forgive me i'm sorry happy new year by the way it's 2015 it's actually not any time at all it's just a one moment called eternity that super advanced monkeys have placed a ridiculous temporal grid on top of but for the sake of giving form to nothingness happy 2015 we've got a fantastic podcast for you today with martin wittforth a brilliant artist uh who uh actually i have uh one of his uh paintings in my living room

i love him he's incredible and uh was excited to get to talk to such a talented human we're gonna dive right into that but first some quick business the dunkin trustle family hour podcast is coming to texas in the midwest in uh january i'm going to be in austin on the 23rd uh houston on the 24th dallas on the 25th and then in march i'm going to be in uh winnipeg on the fourth st paul on the 5th madison on the 6th chicago on the 7th and columbus on the 8th these are all live dunkin trustle family hour podcasts uh and so it's going to be a real blast i hope that you will come out go to dunkin trustle dot com all the dates are there get your tickets in advance these shows tend to sell out so uh don't put it off too much have you been being attacked

by witches lately if so you need to immediately go to dunkin trustle dot com and order one of our shirts i would recommend the dunkin trustle family hour enneagram t-shirt this is a design created by ron regi which is guaranteed to drive off all of those malignant witches who've been throwing their poisonous evil psychic darts in your direction go to dunkin trustle dot com right now and guaranteed that these witches will stop tormenting you stealing your babies setting your churches on fire just because they know you are wearing a shirt that contains upon it a symbol which is a ward design not only to drive off witches but to increase your orgasmic potential by 600 percent we also have a brand new mugs these are high quality grade a

super beautiful mugs if you're drinking your uh your psychedelic infused tea or just tea by the way which is psychedelic in its own way uh then you should be drinking it out of these goddamn mugs i love it i'm drinking out of one of them right now they're super cool we've got mugs there too so go to dunkin trustle dot com also if you're about to buy some bit of plastic uh why not go through our portal uh if you're going to amazon dot com we have what's called a portal there if you click on that the next time you're going to amazon they'll give us a small percentage of whatever it is that you buy and it costs you nothing so it's a great way for you to support this podcast and many many many many thanks to uh those of you who used the portal

last month it was the greatest month that we ever had through amazon so a lot of you went through the portal to do your christmas shopping and i really appreciate that thank you so much for supporting this podcast um and you don't have to do anything like that based on materialism consumerism or buying shit if you want to support this podcast one way you can support this podcast is uh just by going to the forum and posting your ideas or thoughts on the forum located at dunkin trustle dot com sign up for the forum add some spice to that place uh look i understand a lot of forums are filled with indignant shrill angry um uh reviewer types who for whatever reason feel like they need to voice their universal uh their their various critiques for the universe

on internet message boards and i'm not going to pretend that some of those uh people aren't spraying their verbal flatulence all over the forum at dunkin trustle dot com but the greater percentage of the folks over at dunkin trustle dot com are pretty awesome philosophical super smart folks and uh it's a great way for you to not only have some interesting conversations with people who listen to this show but maybe meet up with people who listen to this show and maybe even make sweet little darling babies with people who listen to this show you never know uh you could end up in a probably in a trapped in a you could end up trapped somewhere too by talking to people on that forum so be careful but i hope you don't end up in a basement i hope

you end up falling in love but either way you're gonna have fun go to dunkin trustle dot com join the forum they also have a minecraft server there if you're into that kind of stuff okay awesome here we go uh today's guest on the dunkin trustle family hour podcast is a wonderful artist named martin whitfoot this guy is the real deal if you can if you're in front of an internet connection right now while you're listening to the interview why not go to martin whitfoot dot com that's m a r t i n w i t t f o o t h dot com and just take a look at these incredible paintings that this man does while you're listening to this interview uh he does these incredibly beautiful while simultaneously disturbing portraits of animals and kind of unnatural situations uh it's he's just

an amazingly talented person and i'm so happy that i got a chance to talk with somebody who's this talented and who is this skilled at depicting sort of the imbalance that exists in the world right now thanks to human beings or maybe some who knows i'm not i'm not a fucking ardent analyst i wish i were but you know for me i just think prud they're pretty these images are pretty and they make me feel sad all at the same time and i love that kind of art so go to martin whitfoot dot com check out this guy's art as you're listening to this interview uh if you want links to connect with martin on his twitter or uh to to to buy one of his uh paintings you can find all those links located in the comments section of this interview at dunkintrussell dot com okay everybody so now

please spread out your arms in the crucifixion position open up your mouths and allow a great cosmic psychic astral rainbow to go erupting through the time space continuum and land directly in the heart chakra of the brilliant artist martin whitfoot welcome to the dunk intrussell family our podcast martin whitfoot martin whitfoot welcome to the dunk intrussell family our podcast thank you so much for coming on to the show uh thanks dunkin not really this is a really great honor um i've just been i've been thinking about this a lot as it's coming up you know talking to you but but it's really cool like the just the the kind of thing that you guys are setting up you know you obviously with joe rogan

and a bunch of other people like just feel like you guys are really kind of weaving a tapestry of really interesting kind of inquiry and ideas right now you know um because i'm thinking i'm just sort of the the variety of the kind of guests that you've had on here too and it's just such a such a great honor to to kind of contribute to that too this is awesome oh cool man it's you know it's awesome to have you on i uh i am really fascinated with your art and um i have one of your pictures uh in my living room so every day when i walk in i see it and uh there's something in your how would you describe your art well um so yeah i just came out with a book babble um i think i think i sent you a copy of it as well but uh it sort of summarizes what my art i guess is about um because that the

title kind of speaks to which is that a lot of my work deals with um it's it's allegorical takes on confusion like the kind of confusion that we're seeing in the world um and also with ourselves you know in a sense i uh i think of a lot of my work is kind of these weird self portraits um in that through them i'm trying to meditate on the on the status of where we're at um because i feel like art throughout time you know whatever form it takes whether it's music or dance or plays or you know nowadays film and and certainly paintings it's they're kind of ruminations on the the kind of time that they're being created in um and in that sense i feel like what i'm trying to do through my work is is look at the world that that's unfolding around me in the time that

i'm living through and i'm kind of trying to make sense of it but what i'm what i'm running up against all the time when i'm kind of dealing with new series of work or individual paintings is is that we're you know there's that old chinese curse i don't know if you've heard it but it's uh may you live in interesting times yes and and you know that's something that i kind of come up against a lot with my work is that i'm i'm looking at all the kind of shit that we're dealing with as a species and our confusion with the world that we belong to um and somehow we've created especially in the west we've created this kind of wedge between us and the world that we actually live in and enhance a lot of the work that i'm doing has has to do with with environmental um degradation or

or at the very least just the the the settings that i place these animals in or these allegories in are set by human hands you know there's some we have some collective part to play in what what the stages on which these animals kind of are playing out the scenes that i want them to play out um and and you know uh so with that title babble you know why i thought it was fitting to kind of summarize the work from the past five years that i've been doing into that one volume was uh you know you've probably heard that um have you heard that old uh biblical story about the tower babble yep yeah so the idea there you know to anyone who's listening who hasn't heard it's uh the idea being that you know at one point in time uh mankind was all united as one cohesive balance

species in the sense that they they could all communicate amongst each other and what they ended up doing was they started building uh the tower babble you know and and the idea behind it would be to kind of stand as a as a testament to to human progress and human ingenuity to the point of acting as a kind of stairway up to heaven right um now you know the loon loon god as you call sitting up there and he's he's he doesn't like this at all you know he doesn't like this idea that mankind could be so um so arrogant so what he does is he curses the the workers with with different languages so what we end up with is all of a sudden the workers can't understand one another and the tower falls to ruin because of that and then that you know all mankind scatters upon the

earth and and while that story is kind of you know it's supposed to explain why you find people all over the world how i read it and what i'm seeing a lot of parallels with in in terms of where we're at in the modern world is um is that it's just we just don't understand one another you know like it's it's we don't understand one another because we've left we've walked so far from the proverbial garden as it were you know like uh and that's why when i think of of what i kind of try and tackle with a lot of the work that i'm doing is is kind of just going after that is looking at different ways in which maybe we've departed from some origin source uh and that source you know it's it's hard to define what that would be but i feel like like there's just so much

there's just so much miscommunication happening in the world that uh it's just a fascinating thing to try and kind of distill into my own paintings um and in the way i you know the way i kind of approach my work too is i like to approach it by series and it's kind of like i guess you know some uh comparison could be made to maybe some you know musician making a record where in my case you know every individual painting um serves as kind of a facet of a larger idea um and when it comes to art shows and that kind of thing it's it's usually the way approach is i'll take a i'll take it an idea or a theme and then all the paintings kind of play they're almost different sides of that theme done in the way that i do my paintings right um

so so you know like through if i look back at like the past uh five or six years that i've been doing solo shows and stuff like each of the shows kind of take on some kind of perhaps like some kind of social issue that that is just troubling me you know like because i think when i think of myself as uh an individual i just don't think i have an interesting enough personal story to try and you know there's a lot of people who whose theme is themselves you know there's a lot of people who through the art do some kind of meditation on who they themselves are or their place in society but in my case you know i'm more i'm more interested i'm much more interested than my own personal story i'm more interested in you know what what's the world itself that i live in so um you know one

of the shows for instance just uh thing of 2011 just a few years ago i was i did the whole show was called the passions and and in it i was um i was going after the idea of blind faith and what what uh role that has to play in the 21st century because it was at a time you know when a lot of stuff has been flaring up about differing faiths just not being able to get along and and you know at the time i was reading um a lot of hitchhens and docums and uh sam hares wrote the book end of faith that i thought was really interesting too and in a way like i i just thought like in what way could i maybe kind of try and contribute to that dialogue so what i ended up you know my solution to that was that i um i ended up looking at old classical pieces that featured martyrs martyrs

or saints right yes and in my own work what i because uh you know to anyone listening if they haven't seen the work yet it's it's all animal allegories like i'm not using any human beings in the in the work um and i can get to that later as to why that is but um but in that in that particular show you know what i what i was interested in doing is taking these classical uh you know these classical forms of martyr paintings or sculptures such as michael angelo did the pieta piece which is uh you know mother mary's holding a dead jesus and it's it's uh at the saint peter's basilica on the vatican and and i did a painting version of that like it took the same composition but turned it into this this painting and there are other instances too where do you know do you remember

um or have you ever come across saint sebastian he features a lot of paintings like a lot of painters can you describe him to me because i'm definitely familiar with the name yeah yeah so saint saint sebastian he see what's funny is i and a lot of other people you know i don't know what he actually did as a saint but but how he's always portrayed is in the moment of his death or is at his greatest agony is he's shot full of arrows like that okay sure i'm looking at i just google imaged pictures of him so yeah i've seen you know i've seen this image before but i didn't know it was saint sebastian yeah but it's what's funny so so it's uh like it's just funny that like we we've seen many many probably hundreds of different incarnations of that that martyr

you know like like painters certainly turns him because it's a it's an interesting image but it's it says something about how the you know since the west has regarded the idea of being righteous or being faithful or whatnot is that your greatest sacrifice is either the sacrifice or yourself or the sacrifice of others you know if you think of a martyr a martyr has has never died peacefully in his sleep you know it's there's always got to be a yeah sure some type of great violence that's thrown out dogs made to eat rocks and pushed into they it's like old school crazy tortures that the the isis is kind of resurrecting right now well yeah exactly that it's like this this exactly like you know if you say like biblical torture well it's like you

think of like like horrendous acts and horrendous sacrifice you know and uh and so so that whole show was kind of like a rumination on that so what i did a lot of the paintings in that show featured animals with their heads on fire you know and uh yeah and of course you know like that the initial response i had funny criticisms after that show online i saw some people like talking about how i'm discussing animal cruelty here and stuff but but actually that wasn't at all what i'm going for in in using that symbolism i was i was trying to speak to the halo you know the halo being something that we we see in many different cultures but especially in the in the christian um in the christian kind of visual imagery that we see it's the halo's ring that

it's a ring around the head and it's supposed to be light emanating from the inside suggesting someone's holiness but what i wanted to kind of suggest via that bit of symbolism was that you know just straight just straight up blind faith like that is very destructive you know because it's very it's it's a very divisive way of looking at the world where you have you know your faith somehow must be uh pitted up against somebody else's and you're willing to sacrifice not only your for your own life but in the case if you know a lot of these jihadist attacks you're willing to sacrifice the lives of others just uphold some idea you know at the end of the day it's just an idea and and hitches and dockings and sam harris but sam harris i think the most

eloquently because he he doesn't go in such black and white um they would say that these are bad ideas you know and they're bad ideas to be carried into a world where we're all getting much more connected you mean the idea of uh sacrificing yourself for other people or the idea of violence in relation to that well both that too but also the idea at the heart of it itself which is that i have a certain set of beliefs that are the right ones and you happen to have ones that if they don't line up with mine they are not only wrong but should be snuffed out you know um and then yeah right this is the kind of like where you get into the interesting uh uh religious organism that is humanity where there's this constant weird battle between uh like white blood

cells will try to devour what they consider to be intruders and this has been going on forever it's really funny to watch religions try to eat each other up um at that at one level of the thing there is that amazing interplay that happens where the you know and we see it now you know like uh they the in islam uh isis they they you have to convert when they come into these places you have to convert and if you're a christian they apparently now all this being said there's always this um paranoid conspiracy theorist alex jones level man that lives in my head who whenever i start saying this stuff is like that's government propaganda you don't even know what's happening out there like george orwell ship but just for the sake of of having to believe

something it does appear that these they're these fascists out there devouring uh other religions or using religion as a transmission device for aggression and as a sort of paint job that they're putting on the classic um bulldozer of tyranny or fascism or something you know but yeah but you know it's a great coat of paint you know because it's like if you want to take over something right if you want to if you want to use religion for power which is what it sounds like you're talking about uh or part of what you're talking about if you want to if you want power by itself you that you really will seem maniacal and diabolical if you know like anyone who's like i just want power i want to go to other places and take what they have from them to make myself

more powerful you can't you can't say that it's got to be like those people over there are you know outcast centers and we have to purify that land yeah and it's the fact that it's all steeped in such old dogma i mean that that's that's what i'm sort of most fascinated by too is just the sort of the persistence of these memes like these that these idea structures that somehow inform how people will live in perpetuity i mean because if you think about like like religions as they are you know i'm just talking about the the abrahamic that's three that yeah of the crazies you know where whereas like the the the more those grow when you think of like because they keep saying the fastest growing religion all this other stuff it's it's it's a little disheartening because

you think that by that what is basically said is that that this crazy idea this virus of an idea persists keeps persisting and not only persisting but just but keeps growing right and and and the problem there that i see is that it's it's just simply it's mutually exclusive with the with the ideas set forth by let's say the two other ones that are up there too but it's so at the end of the day what we're kind of just faced with is these these stalemates i mean it's never gonna there's never gonna be a day where you know if you follow any of those ideologies like that one day they'll just be like listen guys like you know we're we all we're all kind of like speaking about the same thing here is just that we we're just using different language it's not

really that i mean there's there's clear clearly set rules and in essentially all the the larger religion saying that no there's really just one way out there's one chosen people there's there's in everybody it's not only enemy but but should be you know should be either converted or slain i mean this is the ancient way that the text kind unfold but but some people such as ices i mean they're they're they're actually full on believing this and this is something that like well yeah but we do it too i mean it's important to remember that the united states does it too it's just the religion of the united states is is the is the is exactly the same as the emperor of the united states it it figured out in the united states we figured out a way to have her like in the united

states we figured out one thing which is here's how you have an empire without uh calling it an empire and then the other thing that we figured out is here's how you have a religion without calling it a religion because uh there were you know our religion is one of buying shit and denial that's a very popular religion and uh you know what i mean so it's like it's just a funny i i'm sorry to cut you off it's just a funny way that um in the east people are using religion to rationalize the exact same war patterns of humanity for countless aeons and uh um in in the west where the what we use to rationalize it is the same kind of hogwash only we call it freedom right right it's freedom that we're doing this for over there they say it's a la we're doing this

for and somewhere else they might say that it's you know heritage our heritage but it's all these really what it all boils down to is you're doing it because you like getting stuff that's why you like power well what you want so the idea being that it's it's what you want is you want your tribe to take the other tribes uh fruit you know you just want their spoiled and at the end of the day like that's that's something that obviously is has been going on time immemorial like you know way before history too is that you know one tribe put it against another and and but but you know cash around something like nationalism patriotism whatever the hell that means at this point and religion you know it all it is is somebody belonging under one flag you know under one banner

you're part of that tribe and all other tribes are somehow uh your adversary you know and and and when you when you're putting it into fairy tale language such as religion you know it's it's uh whoever said I can't remember but I'm aping kind of what or parroting like uh what Sam Harris wrote into faith which is that you know uh all it takes for a good person to behave badly to behave with evil intent is all you need is religion because what you're what you've convinced this person of is that they're actually acting in in accordance to their um to their faith you know like you're you're behaving in a way that is deemed righteous by your tribe but but objectively speaking what you're doing is is very well could be construed as being evil you know and that's that's where it

gets really strange is where with with these with these religious wars and the shit that are going on is that you know it's not there is no tackling villain sitting at the at the at the helm of these religions you know like they all believe that they're they're standing for for the good well they're yeah they're using a trick of the mind to try to rationalize uh their greed and this trick of the mind using this trick of the mind is an it's an evolving trick an old way you would trick your mind into thinking it was okay to rip off somebody to rob someone to kill a bunch of people rape a bunch of women right as you would uh you would you create an imaginary man who is the right man compared to the other people's imaginary men it's just like you know really

hardcore what games of make believe going on here like the most intense game of make believe at the worst slumber party of all time is what you're talking about uh but but it's it's really important to uh not that you can go ahead and point the finger it whatever you want you know and the atheists the uh these these these professional atheists uh which is an interesting new thing that's emerged they will um they point the finger at religion and quite often it seems and that they somehow miss uh the the fact that um more than likely they're using a phone that was built by slaves living in a country where a percentage of everything they make is used to construct bombs that are dropped on children and so it's like the the that it's

important to identify that there is another religion the religion of denial that many many of us are uh devotees of and uh what because it's like it's not religion is just one of the fruits or or rather I would say humans using religion to rationalize destruction humans using an ancient text to rationalize destruction we're I think there's a deeper motivation here man a deeper problem a deeper deeper problem um you know what I mean which is which is uh fundamentally the human tendency to create an us or them situation yeah exactly and that's the that's the whole thing that exists as you said also like with with the idea of empire you know like um because it's it's funny so I live in New York City right and uh you know the the greatest landmark here at least

for a long time has been the empire state building right yeah so so just the the the term empire like the way that it's shifted when just generally the the mindset of people living in a place like like New York City like empire this me at this point in the 21st century as opposed to when it was built just has a different connotation through it it you know you had um so what I'll do okay it's all a fast track so I had a show in 2012 that was actually called empire and um the the kind of premise for that show was was going after this idea of what does empire mean in the contemporary context because um back when they built the empire state building for instance like if you remember there's a very well known photograph of all these construction workers sitting on a on one of the

girders you know and and back then they're looking at this and going you know yes we're building this great empire you know it's it's but empire means you know at the end of the day it's about conquest it's about dominion it's about uh being all powerful and almighty but um you know fast forward to 2012 when I had that show and that's when ox by wall street was happening and the idea of empire especially the fact that it would have had its roots on uh on wall street in New York City what does empire mean now you know when when empire at this point means there's these the these just these monoliths up above these money monoliths that dictate so much of what goes on and rope so many people into their own agendas um where the people themselves their voices have

to be heard on sort of a grassroots level but but you know so many people I've run into here or in LA or whatever like wherever I come across people you know my age group or younger like very often people are just thinking like what you know we don't we don't want to operate in that way anymore you know we're seeing we're seeing much more of a sort of like a global tribe emerging because of the aid of the internet and stuff it's no longer our country having said borders and you know anyone who doesn't belong within those borders just doesn't have the same rights as us for instance and what that's all the all those kind of problems that arise when you think of there there being that kind of tribalism in effect just by living in a particular country too

you know what I mean oh yes yeah I that's I mean I think that is the uh that is all that is a big part a big uh emerging form that's happening is that people are waking up to the ridiculous nature of the conditioning uh and it's super cool to what I mean it's super cool to watch because you you can you start thinking forbidden ideas like there is no united states really it's it's just a landmass and that's a forbidden idea like I you just think about an idea that if you were sitting around a group of like right-wing republican militarists like the things that you could say that would really offend them like I was just watching uh fucking uh one of these war movies it's the new uncoring all by the same guy who did Restrepo and one thing you always hear soldiers

say again and again and again is it has nothing to do it never goes farther than the person on my right and the person on my left who I'm trying to save right and that of course is like one of the primary conditioning thought patterns placed in their brains when they go to boot camp right that's like when you're doing the brainwashing you insert into their mind listen man don't think about why you're here in afghanistan don't think about that it seems to be more to do with some kind of like corporate interest in rare earth metals or some deep politics that you'll never understand therefore making every single thing that you do in some way meaningless just think about the fact that you need to protect the people on the left and the right don't think about this

shit don't think about it yeah don't think about you know why and perhaps the very question like why the fuck am I here in the first place because then you start thinking that right you start thinking that stuff as a soldier and some kind of weird contract with the united states government you start thinking like holy fucking shit man i'm in the goddamn i'm just a pawn in the military industrial complex and all this shit is just designed to make money for rafion and haliburton and fucking cheney and cheney's friends and i don't even know what i'm fucking do what am i even doing this shit for there's where are the nazis that i'm supposed to be killing like where's the where's the actual villain here because it's yes it was something um i did a painting on that um it

was called harvest where i came across these photos where um they're they're all over the internet and people have seen them all over the place but uh there's a you know a u.s soldier guarding an opium field in afghanistan or you know somewhere i think it was in afghanistan retens the picture immediately brings some on it's like wait a minute wait what what like what are the what exactly is is he doing there you know like who's who's hiring that guy to guard that field and there too it's like the the uh revenue that's coming in from a place like afghanistan at this point it's what what is what is exactly the purpose of us being there is what i'm saying is that there's just a sort of confusion on a mass scale as far as the people who first of all didn't vote to have

this happen in the first place but then guys being sent out there and this is these are the kind of jobs that they end up doing and yeah well and generally these guys who are out there pretty fucking awesome i've met many of them in the the the 100 of the time and i have no doubt that there's assholes out there or festering piles of human shit i'm sure it's in every every facet of life but whenever i've met these guys quite often they're really sweet and then that that makes it all the more sinister because because it's like oh they're trying to it seems as though they're trying to uh get some of the best people in the country out of the country and when they're out of the country they're trying to make them do horrible things so that when they come back to

the country they'll have uh awful depression and ptsd and will no longer be functional if there ever were the vague possibility of some form of revolution yeah absolutely yeah yeah um actually that's it's a funny segue but there's a it's one thing that i'm really into well i have been for a while but now i actually have an opportunity to explore it with my work is uh the upcoming shows that i'm doing in the next year and the the year after that have to do with um with shamanism okay so um uh the the thing that i find really interesting is what's happening in psychedelic research that's coming out so uh with mdma assisted psychotherapy for instance like um uh it it's clear like finally there's just some something happening where you know a lot of

these guys who are coming back with terrible ptsd they have had no they've had no nothing to turn to they really like they're the the amount of soldiers that are getting fucked up by just involvement in these wars you know they a lot of them are coming back terribly damaged psychologically damaged you know and and there hasn't been a solution presented that actually offered any kind of real help any kind of real introspective um work on oneself uh and along comes you know like what maps is doing for instance it's it's hugely commendable they're actually offering something that that through mdma assisted psychotherapy is actually showing great results and then that spins off into many of the other ones such as you know with psilocybin and it with

ayahuasca and other things like these like these are these are you know great sense archaic to use sort of like a tern's mechanic term like archaic tools we've had to heal ourselves you know to heal our spirit if you want to call it that or whatnot and they're coming at a time when these solutions need to be looked at and and what why i'm bringing it up in uh connection with the with the with you know the soldiers coming back with ptsd is that through the efforts of maps they're actually you know in the past year i think that they really started being able to um have the government look at these medicines or especially you know with mdma as something that soldiers could really benefit from so the fact that that there's in many many different ways i mean

that the research is no longer sort of mired in any kind of of the stigma that followed it um after the 60s like it's such an interesting time we're going through right now because these things are basically coming from the jungle and from the shamanic mindset all right they're they're coming into the contemporary world at a time when i think we might possibly need it most ever you know well yeah i mean yes i think it is i think that time that time that we need it most is any time you find yourself embodied in the human form in any time period in history is when uh you need it most because it's you know because this when i see saint sebastian uh with the arrows piercing him what i think is yeah on one level it's like i don't know it's uh some kind of fan guy was such an

annoying fanatic that they shot arrows into him he bothered them that on one level it's that but then i think oh you know these people painting this they weren't there are artists you know a lot of them were like connected to the great creative flow of things in the universe but they were in a time period that was quite repressive and when i look at that stuff i think to myself oh saint sebastian that's every human being and those arrows are the the wounds of a lifetime that are that go in deep into ourselves and you don't have to be in a war zone to get ptsd uh you can get a another form of ptsd just from existing in uh this dimension and that form of ptsd manifests in by having a attachment to your personality and you know what i'm saying and and

and those fucking so so man it's it's like whenever i get too far out into into the land of the uh great tendrils of corporations slowly strangling the life out of the planet or con digitizing it almost just converting everything into an inorganic highly restructurable form to be utilized by invisible wealthy people as they pursue deeper and deeper levels of sense gratification when i get too far out into that land or what i like to call curled up in the fetal position in my bed on mushrooms because i thought three wrong thoughts in a row and it'll lead to there i like to bring it back to what is the afghanistan inside of me where the fuck am i as far as being in the moment here here in this moment where am i in in what is my predominant

feeling state you know like your your art reflects the state of the world and it reflects it in such a poignant and beautiful way because somehow you have managed to depict these terrible convergences this kind of like tendency to of society or life to domesticate these beautiful things to shave them down and a lot of a lot of your images show beings in states of varying states of the and animals are so innocent you know so you're using these so these innocent man it's just you can't look at a pelican and think god that pelican deserves to be filled with rusty shit from the it's been eating you just feel the sorrow for the thing you know instant empathy your imagery brings out this kind of instant empathy because if it was humans you

might find ways to think they deserve what they've got so i really love that what you've captured there is that there is an innate beauty to the world that even in the most destructive places you've also brought out the fact that there's this you you force us to find some beauty in the fucking thing you know what i mean you're you're so it feels to me like you are fearlessly gazing into the world and bringing back this kind of report showing that somehow in it all it's still quite beautiful you know what i mean there's something in it that's still quite beautiful but you can't get that without honestly looking at it so in the same way man it's like i try to pull myself out of gazing into that world personally and bring it into me and spend some time staring

into the fucking bloated pelicans of myself right right you know what i'm saying man totally yeah no but thanks a lot for saying that too um it's great to hear that response to work i uh well i think that that um you know with art making itself i mean so it's a very much a human endeavor you know if you think of uh the rest of the the natural world going about its its processes that there's you know you could maybe argue that if dolphins had opposable thumbs like something come out of that but but we are really the the one unique species in that we and then this is where like somebody like graham handcock and tarence mccanough would go into speaking of well there had to be we we just happened to um be and evolved enough and big

grained enough species to venture out into into kind of the world of the the inner dialogue or or in in the case of you know um like shamanism the idea is always that you go out and you bring something back like it's just just the idea of taking let's say ayahuasca and or or eating a bunch of mushrooms and and having a trip and it not informing in any way your you know your everyday self or the way you look at the world i feel like that journey was not successful if if you didn't bring something back you know and i think that art in itself is or can be a kind of shamanic act in in that it's it's like you're you're looking at the condition of the world or yourself um and then distilling it into some kind of form like what you do very very well is is to do it

with words you know like you're you're exploring that realm but you're bringing it back you're sharing with people and and um writers like i would say somebody like like ram hancock for instance like doesn't very good job of looking at many things you know many kind of manifestations of the human archive and and distilling that into something that we can understand as well and you know there's many countless examples of that being done but but i think that um at the end of the day you know it's it's one thing because you know i deal with um with with painting especially like you do come across a lot of examples where where for example a painter will they will really sort of nurture their technique perhaps but i but i but they maybe end there like they'll paint

beautiful landscapes or or just stuff that calms the viewer right yeah and then there's other people take the other direction and just want to do something that's very jar and just just you know just in terms of the handling of the paint or however they they put it down but um piss christ like when the guy put the crucifix in the jar piss yeah exactly or there was a the dude uh i can't remember when he made it but there's a uh the can of the dude shit like he shot in a can and that's that was that was his artistic expression of course it's that i think it's at the moment you know it's taken by the establishment it's taken as serious art but but but it's uh you know i i think that where i'm like where i maybe want to kind of land with my own work is is just to be able to process

those things somehow myself like it's it's really an active kind of meditation for me it's just to kind of to not turn my eye away from from let's say what's what's happening with the environment and stuff and and try and put that voice into some kind of visual medium that i can then share with people but uh you know whether or not it's it's successful or not it's it's not even you know there's that i you use this this quote before and i i uh i i've i've liked a lot too and i've used it with with regards to some lectures and stuff too with with the bug of a guitar it's like you know you um you have the right to your actions but not the fruit of your actions right so it's it's the the act of creating something like a painting um it's it's doing it's doing personal

work you know you're you're you're putting it down putting down some kind of ideas with the idea with the intent of of just calming some part of yourself that needs an outlet right um yeah and and musicians do it through their music and writers do it through writing and and uh but i think that to not to not look at the world as it is or to not explore i feel like it's it's not doing service to the fact that we don't have very much time to to be curious in the world you know it's it's uh it's it's something that i think it's it's it's a great challenge sometimes to try and look at what's actually happening around you and then to try and do something with it the thing can be perceived by anyone viewing it oh my god it's so hard man

it's so hard to spend any amount of time any amount of time on it i mean really the training is such that we're we've been taught not to not to really look deeply into anything it it's at all whatever it is you know and you with the deeper you look into anything it's just that it's very interesting the way the detention works very in a very similar fashion to a microscope that the longer you spend being attentive to any one thing the the more you zoom in on it to the point where you begin to realize that whatever the particular thing is seems to be completely empty and that that to me that's where my brain's at right right now more and more is just because the um the the drama of the world and the drama of my inner world um no no matter what it is uh the these this stuff that i've been

trying to avoid for probably my my entire life you know in different ways if you ever um yeah you don't you obviously aren't one of these people but some people a lot of people maybe you too they spend a great deal of effort trying to avoid certain parts of themselves you know like admitting that i feel like shit most of the time for example yeah i know believe me i'm i'm there with you you know that thing where you like just start so you're trying to ignore the fact that most of the time you really don't feel that great you're kind you're kind of upset or angry or it's what in buddhism is called fundamental dissatisfaction and so you're sort of trying to avoid that and uh the more you avoid it the more the world around you sucks right right right you know what i mean

there's that peculiar paradox which is that the more you ignore the uh can of shit that is your psychic arena that you're living in the more you see that out out in the world uh and and um i keep trying to articulate this with your art and i think i'm i'm gonna give it one i'm gonna give it another shot which is that you're okay when i meditate if i spend enough time doing it uh then all of a sudden that pain inside because i'm not turning away from it i'm actively looking at it for one quick weird millisecond it seems kind of beautiful not in a elliott smith way either and not in like i feel sorry for myself way but like whoa wow that's fucking really a cool energetic form that is inside of me there's something so like beautiful in it or i'll feel compassion for it

right so but if i don't spend time looking at it uh then it just it just feels like a something to avoid and when i'm when i say it i mean like there's no specific thing i just mean like anger or underlying feelings of fear or of death or any of that stuff uh so you're what you're doing with your art which i think is alchemical is that uh you are taking these images of the world but god damn it martin they're they're they're so beautiful while simultaneously being so sad and do you know what i'm saying and that to me is it's such is the kind of the that's the halo coming out of your art so to speak or the inner illumination in the thing is that somehow it's managing to be simultaneously horrifying and exquisitely beautiful at the same time which

and god damn it if that's not the dna that seems to be running this whole show you know well i'll tell you i mean it's it's great it's a great thing hearing you say that about the word because that's it's with myself to my my taste in our whatever form it takes has always been that if i don't feel a certain tension from the work like like a push and pull kind of effect or a um it kind of uh effect that the art has in that it's not just playing one note on my emotions you know in the sense that like that the the greatest pieces of music or the greatest paintings or or the greatest films you know that that i've ever come across have always had that that um um it's it's had the awareness and it's shared and sort of uh mirrored this awareness that

there's the beauty of life is that it is made of the the duality like like the fact that there like that when when you're let's say faced with art that um let's say a movie that makes you cry and there's let's say it's a sad scene well frozen right right um yeah like like the that if it's very effective it's if it's a very great piece of artwork what i feel like it's doing it is it's it's both that if you're uh brought to the point of crying over it i think it's a both a celebration and uh a kind of morning happening at the same time like um what i'm trying to say there is that that artwork that really speaks to me kind of encompasses the whole thing it's it's the tragedy meeting with the joy of it um in in you know like something like like um

when let's say you lose a loved one um the the the kind of grief that you feel is at the same time as being a sense of loss it's also a sense of celebration of the fact that you had this connection with this person oh that's the whole it's the whole picture so i one yeah i wanted to ask you actually i i get the sense just from um i haven't heard you speak a lot of times about these kind of things i don't you've never done ayahuasca right no i haven't done ayahuasca yet i uh but man i know i'm gonna do it because i keep like i've heard now from like somebody gave me a letter that somebody wrote somebody at an ayahuasca ceremony knew someone who knew me okay and she wrote this letter uh about her ayahuasca experience but sort of the end of it was you know you really

need to take ayahuasca uh you know i've gotten that a bunch of times well i'll tell you i mean it's it's at the same with with why bring that up is that um because i've done i've participated in two ayahuasca ceremonies at this point so i drank it six times all together so i'm still i'm like an infant when it comes to the what if this thing is you know but but my last time so i'll maybe i'll just give you a short little trip report because it kind of gets to what we're just talking about here um so this this last time i went uh just this past summer it was my second ceremony but i decided um my friend jeff flew up from la and we um we decided to you know we took part in this thing for four days straight so it was what they were calling like the warrior

dose which i thought was hilarious because the shamans do it every night but um but uh but yeah it was it was so not so so um you know that it was the first night of that ceremony brought me straight back to where i was at um the previous fall where i had done ayahuasca but i i didn't get past the certain block that i had you know like and i think the block is simply purging itself you know because because you know like with ayahuasca there's a there's a great emphasis on the purge it's even colloquially called the purge in some parts of south america where they practice it right um and i think that that uh i had that blockage that was preventing me from just releasing into it because you know the thing with a lot of psychedelic um medicines is that you you have to surrender it's

it's a it's the first teaching you get is that if you let go and surrender into it you're you're likely to get what you're supposed to be getting out of it if you're just sitting there fighting it that's not gonna happen um so with this with this ayahuasca trip the second night that i sat i remember just sitting there you know um and i i could sort of formulate in my mind i was like i know why i have this block it's funny like i've had a i've had a kind of phobia about vomiting in public since i was a little kid uh i was yeah i was on a i was on a trip with my mom up in uh and we were in the canary islands and they're they're volcanic islands right so there's like a one of them has a pretty tall volcano they can take a bus ride up on and

i think it was like 10 or 11 or something and we went up on this bus ride and i'm sitting i you know i'm i'm taking a nap in my mom's lap and at one point i just uh i remember this pretty clearly is weird but i i woke up from this nap all of a sudden needing to vomit very badly right and my mom uh it was it was laugh i'm like sleeping in right she finds a bag a plastic bag that i uh proceed to vomit like half my body weighed into but we didn't realize but there was a hole in like the whole plastic bag was just a like a long tunnel so i'm vomiting all over her laugh and myself i'm like it was a total mess and it's a full bus man it was like a and we got up to the top and my mom gives me a sprite and then on the way back you know like coming back

down the mountain like i think you know i think i can make it but whatever and then and i proceed to vomit i think two or three more times to the point where the bus had to stop and i'm like vomiting the bushes and it was just it was just brutal right but thinking back i'm like maybe that's the thing is i've kept some part of that we're like it was just traumatizing you know so so since then it's always been one of those things right associate of course vomiting most people would associate it with being sick whereas with with ayahuasca the emphasis is on no the purge is is healing yourself and you know from from the kind of western mindset where that i'm steeped in it it struck me as like it struck me as very odd that there's a i'm not in a room full of people it's

20 people each night plus the two shawls that i was working with and people are vomiting all around me you know and somehow that block was still there where i'm like no you know like i it i can't let go into that thing but then so this this night in the summer the second night that i had was i finally i just faced it i was just like look this is not a big deal like it's it's like look everyone's doing it like just just go for it it's it's just gonna happen and it was so bizarre man because it didn't come even out of a place of nausea i had no nausea and then all of a sudden i once i like i did this kind of like uh like mental uh or or psychic aerobics where i was just like okay i'm priming myself to just let go and i want to find out what this thing really is like i really

want to see what ayahuasca is supposed to be and it just happened all of a sudden just out of nowhere there's this very trippy visuals going on too but but what what ended up happening was a massive release like it just the whole thing released into this once you know i had this purge and it the whole thing just cleared up for me and i realized like oh this is what the experience is supposed to be you know there was there was just immense lucidity and clarity while being visually extremely psychedelic but there was a there was a sort of a really great sense through that release that that now i'm seeing what all the yammering is about like this is really like this is this is the real deal and it's it's fascinating that it's something that's been practiced for very very long

time by people who seem greatly at balance with their surroundings right and and i remember and i remember just thinking like so i had this very very interesting evening and then um so i bought a place up in woodstock in upstate new york and the ceremony was being held in upstate new york just maybe an hour hour and a half away from my i have this barn on this land and and uh i remember that next day you know driving back in between i just want to recharge with my friend um back in my spot and and i went and like did yoga in my field and i remember all of a sudden man like just i started just sobbing like sobbing uncontrollably for the simple fact that it was that that thing we were just saying like that i i realized that i and pretty much everybody i know

like we we live in a structure that's been set up where we don't have that kind of ritual anymore you know we don't have that kind of connection because it's like you know i'm sitting there on the ground and i'm feeling the grass under my fingers and just you know bare feet and i have my toes on the grass and you know i really i felt this incredible sense of connection with that but you you know i was completely baseline by this one like there was no iowaska thing going on during the day but i but i felt such an immense sense of the the belonging like i finally found myself feeling like oh i belong on this land that i bought you know i've only been here for half a year and i really feel like this is real connection but but there's such a veil over

the the everyday kind of perception that i and most other people have of the of the unity of all these things you know it's it's something that we've done a very good job of convincing ourselves that we are somehow other than the world that we come out of and just having that like i remember just feeling such a sense of tragedy but such a sense of gratitude all rolled into one yeah if you ever if you ever seen that uh video of the laboratory chimpanzees getting released and they've been inside their whole lives and they let them go outside yeah i haven't seen it no no well i'll send it to you but it's it's this exact thing that you're talking about which is these poor things have been kept in an enclosure according to this their entire lives

oh wow yeah yeah and so they let them at like the laboratory like somehow someone saved the chimps and it shows them for the first time coming out of this awful place into the light oh god the first like they come out and like two of them hug they can't believe where they're at and they they embrace each other and then just start running around and it's the simultaneously the most tragic beautiful thing uh and in that sobbing you're talking about that moment where you maybe get a little bit of time in the maybe you're not completely free but suddenly you get taken out of solitary confinement and put in the prison yard when it comes to awakening yeah that that moment where you're like oh god oh god i've my whole life i could

have had this right exactly you know and and and in that that poignant sort of thing it's still looking back it still means that you haven't fully surrendered it still means that you haven't fully given in to the beauty because there's still a sense of you that's clinging to the past you know i say this because that's my anytime like i have any kind of epiphany epiphanous moment there is a sense of nostalgia and sadness that goes along with i think god damn it man if i was figured this out when i was 15 right exactly yeah you know but it's fuck it you know the the the real i think i don't i have a theoretical understanding of this not an actual understanding but from what i've read and and my observations of people who seem to have been managed to get

out of the prison altogether or almost out uh it really doesn't matter the um well nothing i mean i mean it sounds so weird and callous but it's like you sort of come out of time or something you know like you're you're not you realize that the whole interplay of of the the what you're talking about this thing having gone away uh you're simultaneously saying it was once here right exactly yeah yeah you know what i mean so you're you're talking about the dissipation now but it was once here it's the same thing as like going out into a a garden during the winter and seeing these old withered old rose bushes or you know what i mean and you look at it and you're like god this must have been the most beautiful garden ever but you know what i mean but it's the winter

so right now what are the gardeners doing is it's doing whatever plants do in the winter comes and you know what i mean it's the same thing things arise things dissipate things arise things dissipate and in the dissipation there is this sadness and the arising there's this excitement but god damn it it's the same it's both or this it's all the same and then anyway god damn i'm sorry to keep you that's all this four more person tells me it's all the fucking same i'm gonna punch them in the face i'm so sick of hearing that but it is all the same right right but it's it's funny the duality there because it's like the it's it's the same but it's also constantly flowing it's always shifting right like the the the thing that i think it's a lot of people sort of imprisoned in

their own kind of neuroses is that they they want to preserve a state in which they perhaps find themselves in forever it's like i have to have it be this way but but nothing like nothing will remain that way you know and i think that that and um serve an unacceptance of that being the case is what gets people locked up and i feel like a lot of anxiety and stuff is that they it you know that's where they have attachment to things that inevitably they will have to let go of at some point anyway you know so so that's why i think that um what is what is super interesting and this is where i'm kind of going with with um my next series of work is is this archaic thing you know like my um i have a museum show in long beach in two years i mean it's it's

far off uh a way that i'm i can only speak to it sort of peripherally but uh but yeah the the show at the museum um i think i already have a title for it i think i'm going to title it the archaic revival cool turns McKenna's book and it's going to be kind of a visual exploration of the same idea that he was talking about which was that um from the past you know from a very very long storied uh connected past that we all share you know there are these things that want to communicate with us you know like like and it's it's an odd time to be living through right now because of the the interconnectedness just of knowledge like like the the fact that we can find out of about let's say experiences such as psychedelics right um whereas up until

just a very recent time ago it was all just sort of rude like little sort of mutterances that you would hear like hearsay among people whereas now there's there's just so much more to kind of uh there's just so much more to dip into if you want to get any kind of information about anything like this and i feel like what's happening and largely aided by it's it's funny at that ayahuasca retreat that i went to um i ran into a couple of people who it was funny like we just in conversation i was like oh hey how'd you find out about this and uh a couple of them were like oh because of you and joe rogue wow yeah no it's crazy man and it's it's it's just that like the the spreading of information like the way that people can candidly speak about about everything right now you know

it's just i feel like what it's what it may be leading to this is where i'm very hopeful is that it's just leading to people shedding more and more of these kind of uh these these fear cloaks that they've been walking around and because they just haven't had the right access to the right information um whereas you know like like what i foresee perhaps happening is a lot more people being more brave and more adventurous to to explore facets let's say of themselves that can really only be access let's say via some plant agent or something yeah right sure yeah that is the that is um the the you know man the the word archaic is a great word uh but but i think it can be confusing and and i understand why mckinn has said it but i i think it's like that thing

that you tune into on ayahuasca for me when i smoke dmt that thing that you tune into is is not in time it didn't feel archaic to me at all it felt and it felt high tech it felt cutting edge it felt very like the the very peak of of advancement and um i think that that really there was a time when people who are an archaic people were tuned into that thing outside of time and their method for tuning into that thing outside of time um is old but it's still it's like it's it's the thing that you're talking about there man coming into the world uh that thing is not in time i don't think it's in time we are in time that thing is in time in the form in our as much as we are in time but there's a big part of it that's not and it's sort of like um there's all these

tricks like what you're talking about the people that have been taught for a very long time about here's how to open the window did you know that there's a most people who are in solitary confinement would be stunned to find out that there was a fucking window in there that they didn't know about yeah you know what i mean but it's like if you do this certain ritual you could there's a window that's going to start forming in this thing that you thought was completely closed off and then that window opens up through the psychedelic experience but also through meditation practice uh and or through some combination of these two things um and you look out that window and just seeing the world out there is incredible but people like you are actually

or an artist or anyone now who wants to has access to this and what but what ends up happening when you open the fucking window which is of course the window of your heart is that these vines from outside of time start growing through you into the world these weird tendrils you know what i mean it's like it's not even you you know what i'm saying you've like ripped open this window in the prison of yourself and all of a sudden some kind of alien process is growing out of you into this dimension and i think that's growing out of so many people right now that it's um we just have to i have to start believing what my mother's new age boyfriend back in the early 90s told me which is that there is an awakening happening well i think but it's

funny listening to mckenna lectures too because most of them were from the 80s and 90s right and uh there's so many things that he's sort of pointing out because this is the infancy of the internet you know but he's he's talking about things that that uh were just on the horizon but he was talking about them in in the way that no they're definitely happening and the the momentum towards people you know people starting to awaken to there being a lot more at work than just the sort of mundane idea that the materialists would propose right like he was of the opinion that the internet for instance would have a huge thing to say about how how information about these things would be would be shared you know and i think that uh what we're what we're actually

really seeing happening right now is is the hopeful part of me is is thinking that there is still enough time there there's enough time for people now to start banding together and collectively saying that you know the old world or the standard model just it's not even a fraction of the whole picture you know like that's right it's it there's there's way more process at work and but it has to start with the individual you know like like when people are always like well we gotta make the world this or that for you know other people we'll start with ourselves man like we gotta but we have but but i'm saying that through through agencies like like plant-based psychedelics for instance there's it's a very democratic kind of tool that has just landed

back among society and you know in the 60s i feel like like when when people talk about leery and uh in the way that it became sort of like sensationalized the psychedelic revolution um i feel like the disservice that it did was it was just kind of like let's just willy nilly just go for it like everybody turn on right but whereas what i feel like is happening now once we've had time to cool off from that is there's a very certain there's a very beautiful kind of awareness of the reasoning behind seeking it if that makes any sense like like like people aren't just randomly now dropping some psychedelic and and waiting for the results to happen like you know when when they often say that you should have intention when you go into yes such a thing as a psychedelic

experience well well i feel like like having listened to a lot of people now having the means to listen to a lot of people talk about these things reading a lot of stuff that people have written about them reading research about them like now somebody going in let's say even for the first time they're much more prepared than somebody would have been in the 60s when nobody knew what the fuck would happen if you ate five dry grams of mushrooms that's right yeah that's right you're talking about the awful one of the terrible one of the many awful things that happen because of the prohibition on psychedelics is that you know all these bad trips that you could have just based on not knowing the chemical process that was happening in your mind exactly and dude

like that's that's the thing is setting okay so i've sort of for a long time called mushrooms my guru of sorts because i've i've learned to kind of use them very rarely you know i only maybe like two or three times a year at most but but but i've really learned at least for myself what my ideal or at least as close as an ideal setting as possible could be for myself right and and i've learned that just respecting them in that way but largely due to again like the the research that i did just for myself as far as like well how should one set this up to avoid having it go bad uh i mean what it's what it's turned out to be has been very interesting experiences i mean there's there's there's a whole lot that i've gleaned out of those experiences but

but i could very well i've often had you know trips were in the middle of them i've just thought like holy fuck like imagine if i was at a bar right now or at a house party like this this would be bad this yeah it would simply be bad because because the the you know let's say like drunk people around me that normally i could just very easily contend with like they would become demonic you know or whatever like like like it just just the idea of even having to navigate home let's say i'm at a bar in manhattan and i had to take the subway back to brooklyn when tripping super hard on mushroom it it's a nightmare i mean just the whole all the variables about that are unpleasant to the extreme whereas you know this i feel like people un uh i guess

uninitiated into the dialogue about psychedelics they they could very well make that mistake and then never touched them again he'd say no they were terrible i had a terrible time and then you asked them well what were you doing and they said well i you know i i went to you know i went to bars i went to disneyland right right hand which which if if you had a really good sitter with you could actually be really interesting but i don't know man i it's just the my part on especially around people on psychedelics is that i'm so tuned into whatever specific psychic uh aroma is emerging from them you know like it just feels like you can just feel the exact spectrum of consciousness that person is existing on you can see in the same way that you're caught up in whatever dramas

that you that you're caught up in inner personally when you are on mushrooms or psychedelic and you see say an an angry father with a group of unruly kids and and and normally you might just ignore but here you look and see the veins in his neck or like kind of pumping his eyes bulging like a cow and a being pushed into one of those slaughterhouses that kind of bulging weird look of a trapped animal that can never escape and the whole the kids are just like you know covered in like mashed potatoes and the whole thing just seems like some kind of like sixth layer of hell thing where you're walking the mushrooms are fucking um who walked Dante through hell um Virgil yeah the mushrooms are like walking you through like the hold you know so yeah like that's like that's a that's a if you're

not prepared for that because by the way if somebody came i know if someone invited you to for a walk through how you would take it i would too if you like sign me the fuck up and in fact if there was a way to sell tickets that you could walk through hell that would be the most exciting amusement park of all time like everyone would walk through hell because they're prepared for it well and that's the thing like again because it's you know you have you have the framework going into it at least even because there's no way of saying like oh you're fully prepared for a thing like let's say ayahuasca like it brought it's an ordeal like these are not to be taken lightly in the sense that you can't just you know plug in and expect this thing to go exactly like you predicted

in fact that that's definitely not what's going to happen but but um setting the intention ahead of time and and then having a safe framework to do it and that's that's really all that it's it's required you know um so there's a whole idea of having like a trip sitter for instance like somebody who who you trust very well and they're quite experienced in in the thing that you're about to take um and all their role is is just to be there not to try and guide you in directions because they don't know where the fuck you are when you're in the middle of it right like but they but they are that anchor they they set they set that part of your mind that might be worried about things getting too bonkers around you like they kind of set that all in place by just being there

they're just a presence for you right and I think that uh certainly like something like a difficult trip or whatever if people want to call it a bad trip under the right setting could actually be the best kind of experience you could have because you you do learn a lot I mean that's because it at you know going back to an earlier part of our conversations it's it can shine a light on that part those parts of yourself that you normally um you distract yourself away from for example like like I have this funny habit of like and I I'm trying my my dam to get rid of it you know slowly but if I get in a thought about anxiety let's say I get like stressed and all of a sudden like I'll just think about something that stresses me out I'll go like hey what's going on on Facebook

right now yes I'll actually like click on the Facebook button on my computer or or on my phone just just to kind of to to shut that little voice up that's saying hey have you looked at this thing that you might be doing you should maybe doing better or at least having an honest look at like so it's something that um that that whole distraction thing we've certainly in in the day and age we're living through and now like we've suddenly set up a really efficient framework by which people can distract themselves from what's really going on this is why I like meditation this is why um to med mindfulness meditation in particular sitting down for a prescribed period of time 30 minutes 45 minutes and treating your consciousness as though it were a an aquarium

and you were sitting in front of it staring into the aquarium watching all the funny little fish that swim around inside of you yeah it is fucking crazy man because what this is called so this is like one of the Buddha's prescriptions or whatever instructions was uh watch the way things arise and dissipate the way they come into form and go out of form within you just sit and watch the thing come and go come and go and man that what you're talking about the anxiety the voice telling you hey take a look at this and then the the concurrent anxiety state that goes along with the voice you can actually watch that anxiety state go when you're meditating you can sometimes see it appear as a tiny little dot on the horizon and slowly slowly slowly emerge into

your awareness and trigger the emotional state of anxiety or whatever the horrible feeling tone is you can then feel the rising feeling tone feel all the thoughts that go along with the feeling tone like i need to do this i need to do that why did she do that why did he say that why am i not doing this oh fuck i forgot to do that you watch the feeling give birth to all these other like like it's like those fish that swim around whales it's like the big ones have got all these other thoughts that swarm around it and you'll watch the whole thing get bigger and bigger and bigger come right against the aquarium of your awareness every part of your body will suddenly want to convert that horror that you're looking into into an action which is like shit

i bet you know what i need to make sure my phone's plugged in and if you're not careful you'll be standing up and you won't be meditating anymore because it actually knocked you backwards it like it went from being this tiny little dot to a feeling that is overwhelming to the point where you had to go check facebook and then you see oh my god the fucking winds of my mind are blowing me into the direction of facebook what else are they blowing me into and you know what i mean and so that practice of just sitting and watching these things come and go come and go it brings you it it it it really can have a significant effect on the way you function in the world yeah yeah well Doug let me ask you like so when you when you meditate um

what in how do you set it up i mean this is something i always contend with is that like now now i'm having an easier time because i'm up in often up in my place in upstate new york where i have this field right and it's really like it's in the woods man like there's not there's my nearest neighbor like i can't throw a baseball that far right so uh so like like it's it's one of those things right there throughout the summer i would just go sit in my field and it's it's just there's nothing like coming in from the outside to uh to distract me but i still feel myself being so bad at it that i'm i'm distracting myself you know like i'll i'll get into for example like a breathing thing and and paying attention to my breath but even so it's just very quickly all

of a sudden i'm just thinking about some other shit and then my breathing is just becomes that shallow little like you know whatever i'm thinking about it it overrides that practice that i'm supposed to be doing just by breathing whereas you know uh i've been wondering that about when when people are meditating and allow themselves to actually get pretty deep with it is how do you how do you set it up like do you have a chance like or yeah i'll tell you the way i do it but first of all what you just described as doing meditation as not being good at meditation is meditation so the i think a lot of people at first when you think about meditation you think it's just you somehow go into the state of being able to pay attention to your breath even though for the majority of

your life you haven't been able to pay attention to fucking anything like suddenly you can sit down and just pay attention to your breath uh it really what it is is you're sitting down it's not that you're paying attention to your breath you're paying attention to everything so you're paying attention to the way that you you're you're aware when you are focused on your breath and the and and the depth with it with it within which you can study your breath and the various aspects of breath and the um the all the implications of breath and all the stuff that's all the you can go from when you're listening or watching your breath you can go to you know as far into the mind as you want to go which is like and all you can like have all these concepts that are very romantic like this

breath is the wheel of time connecting me to the universe and the mind will get very flowery and then if you wanted to you can just get into the sound of your breath the way it's coming in and out sounds like a wind on the beach sometimes or some zen buddha say it's like a snake going through the grass and then like you can then like go even deeper into the way that the feel of breath is coming in and coming out there's all these you realize that the thing that seems so boring at first is in fact a fractal that you can you can sort of get lost in and that's when you're paying attention to your breath right but those moments are going to be pretty small for you and for most of us because most of the time your thoughts will have dragged you away and in a kind of crazy

instantaneous uh just uh within milliseconds you'll find yourself lost deep in a tunnel of thought and uh and then all of a sudden you'll be back watching your breath again and you'll be like whoa what the fuck man I was just fucking fantasizing about a trip I took to Mobile Alabama when I was 16 you know like what the fuck and then but now you're back in the breath again and in fact now you're like watching the way that you're you're conceptualizing it and you're actually watching your mind being like whoa what the fuck and then you realize like oh shit that's just another thing in my field of awareness which is the uh the the the reporter that's reporting in on the meditation and you're watching that too and so basically what you're

doing is your um uh as in in this state of observation of all the particulates of the self you're learning about yourself and because because if sitting still with very little distraction or no distraction and watching your breath if a dog barking suddenly makes you start feeling a deep heartbreak over the death of a parent or the loss of a loss of a love at some point in your life then what's happening when you're walking through the world and getting the strobe light effect of all the various pixels of phenomena getting blasted into your mind at every single second how much crazier is your mind going then so you know what I mean so you're sort of you're learning how how the mind your mind and your thoughts and everything functioning everything

that you think is you is actually just as much um is actually something being held within a much bigger version of who you are the thing that actually doesn't have boundaries at all so that's what that's the practice it's not you don't you what you cannot meditate in the wrong way right okay there's no mistakes to be had here there's it's not like working out you will not pull a muscle there's not going to be oh there's not a wrong way you just the way I do it is I get a pillow I have what's called a puja table which is like a and you don't have to do this I just do it because I'm a hippie but I have a puja table it has a candle on it it's got actually this book by an artist I love named Ron Regi who uh it's got his book opened up on it and I've got a candle

there I've got a picture a little Ganesh deity I've got a Jesus keychain I've got a um shell that my girlfriend's mom gave me I've got a picture a big picture of Neem Karoli Baba and I've got a picture of a sea turtle I took uh so that I can barely see it it's kind of swimming off into the depths it's just a little dot uh and so that's it that's the puja table and I sit there light a candle and I'll chant Hari Krishna for about 30 minutes and then at the end of chanting Hari Krishna I will follow my breath for about 15 or 20 minutes and practice sort of mindfulness meditation and then when I'm done with that I'll ring this I'll ring a little bell for no reason and then that's it cool that's really cool man yeah well because that's I think as you pointed

out I think it's probably a very like individual thing like everyone's practice will will be different in some way right um and and you know I guess with with feeling that I'm like I I just feel like I ought to make it more of a consistent practice though and and the funny kind of like paradox there is that I'm not finding or the irony I guess would be that I'm not finding I don't find myself finding the time to meditation off which is it exactly the point of meditation is to try and cease that yammering that you could constantly have to be doing something oh yeah that reminds me of there's a very funny story a guy I was talking to a Buddhist teacher uh and he said to him how long should I meditate each day and the teacher said meditate for

30 minutes a day and he's like I don't have time for that and the Buddhist teacher said well then you should meditate for an hour a day that's awesome very cool yeah it because you know you never do trust me man you could be sitting on a plane you could be sitting on a beach on shipwrecked on a fucking beach with uh from riding on a like gourmet food ship and all the great food and wine and water is washed up on the shore everything you need is there nothing to do and you still won't have fucking time to meditate yeah yeah yeah because it's because it's it's it's uh it's just so fucking weird and and it can be quite painful in in in a really beautiful way but the combination of a psychedelic of being a psychonaut or using plant medicines to

reach into the transcendent um it can really be supplemented with using stillness to reach into the transcendent because these guys they they Ram das and Krishna das and a lot of my teachers they love getting high on psychedelics so much that they didn't want to come down anymore yeah yeah exactly yeah well I think though that that that's kind of the teaching that I've found that I've been finding in psychedelics is that what it's showing you and this is where it gets so interesting that the fact that they are such healers when it comes to a lot of people's very legitimate sort of psychic neuroses such as addictions to other substances and whatnot is that and this is where where where you know the western model is scratching its head a little bit

is that you know that the experiences open doors within yourself where you are the thing that's healing yourself if you know what I mean like like if you take um such an example as the Johns Hopkins study that they're they use psilocybin to to cure people of nicotine addiction you know they've been and they they select from their group very very specific group of people who have been smoking for a very long time and a lot you know it's not just sort of casual smokers and they were getting insane results just with three psilocybin sessions administered over I think three weeks and you know a year later they'd look in check in with these people and maybe I think there was one person relapsing and smoking again had a pretty significant group right and and what

that's showing is that there's not nothing there's not some magical chemical inside the actual mushroom itself or or in their case you know they're obviously using the synthesize psilocybin but there's nothing about psilocybin that all of a sudden hits at the nicotine receptor and shuts it down it's you having had that experience that are it is finding it within yourself to be some some stronger part of yourself has just emerged and realized that you are stronger than this demon or this imp that you're carrying around you're the one doing the work and and similarly so I find that you know um people that I met at these these ayahuasca ceremonies um because that's the first time I've done psychedelics with a bunch of people especially a bunch of people

I didn't know right and you know you're there for a significant amount of time you know over a long weekend or four days or whatever and you you meet a lot of people who this was their entry way into it using some plan that has sent open them up to the experience that oh wait a minute I should I should go through my life and change my life to become more tuned to this frequency so so there are a lot of people there that that that had been changed enough by these experiences and they keep coming back to them just as reminders and to work because there's no bottom to this thing it's not that you're gonna do this and somehow fix yourself forever it's it's because there's always facets of yourself you you can have another look at but but it fell to me

that meeting a lot of these people that they're in their everyday waking life they're doing way more work on themselves than people who haven't had those kinds of openings ever appear to them um and and that that brings me to you know how Ram Dass has basically his his Genesis story as to how he became Ram Dass yes begins with Leary giving him mushrooms and then him seeing manifestations of himself appear in the room that he keeps shedding you know he sees himself as like the Harvard professor who's like well am I that guy I mean I am that guy but but it's not it doesn't define who I am am I the tennis star I think that's what one of the manifestation all these different sort of identities that he had upon himself

he just shed them and then realized like wait a fucking minute like I there's much more to to me than just to than me being shaped by my environment like there there are many layers within myself and that that's the thing that opened him up to and I feel like there are many many people out there who kind of have the intro via these these substances and then they and then they develop let's say a meditation practice in which they're trying to I feel in a way kind of tap back into the frequency because it is a universal frequency it's not that I feel like that's what's so bizarre between let's say mushrooms and ayahuasca both being tryptomies of course but they there's in both those experiences I've found that there is some there's something

in it compelling us to do better with ourselves right yes yes so and so and and and it spills into this this idea that like when you're down when you're back to being I guess sober if that's the word you want to use it's it they're compelling you to just do better in this mode as well so it's not just that you're not just looking forward to your next trip where you can escape this world in fact it's it's it's a matter of hey come back into the world but now you have this other layer that you've seen which it can't be unseen I mean these are not just random dreams that you have when you go to sleep you know like these are they're very lucid I mean there's a lot going on there where you you're not just seeing interesting fractals and shapes no that is a

part of it as well but but but there is a there's something about them that that I can't I can't put into real words because I don't quite understand it but there's something in it that is trying to tell us that that we are much greater than we normally perceive ourselves to be so if we can somehow bring that into our our everyday lives like some kind of practices that remind us of that or just just sort of act as a way of shedding those things that we certainly don't need anymore like a kind of purge like a daily purge I think that any kind of practices like that one picks up from the psychedelic experiences or whatever other way someone has of I've seen them I think that that's that's what I find is the most most interesting thing about ever doing something

like an ayahuasca retreat or let's say a meditation retreat something that that on the surface might even seem like an ordeal but it's only by going through it kind of like the proverbial like Joseph Cambellian hero's journey where it's like you have to kind of you have to be willing to walk through a certain valley where it's going to be frustrating and it's going to be at times terrifying even but when you get out on the other side like by god you gotta you got a lot more to go on in other words you know yeah man and and and that uh intent that's kind of universal intention that seems to be coming through the psychedelic that intention of healing or refinement I think it's really important to realize that the meditation retreat and the ayahuasca ceremony and

the mushroom trip with a shaman and whatever the the nucleus of the temporal event is if you just set up in your mind the intention to start moving in that direction right then you can subvert the one of the great tricks that the mind plays which is I'll be holy then after my big ayahuasca trip not that's when I'm really going to be a kind person or after the meditation retreat what you do is you set the intention now at this very second in the whatever the pigsty or the sacred utopia your mind happens to be regardless of if you're the most beautiful peaceful being that ever walked the earth or if you just set fire to a church or something and you're wearing a potato sack over your head and about to invade a summer camp if if you in that though if

you just can just in a in that moment just start shifting in the direction mentally that there is the potential that you can have it awakening in your life then um that that'll start creating these kind of radical changes prior to whatever your mushroom trip or ayahuasca trip or acid trip or meditation retreat or vipassana retreat experiences and that's why I really love Terrence McKenna talking about the singularity and how it's so powerful it was blasting these things called tachyon particles backwards through time you know what I'm talking about like so like in the same way I like to think of the personal singularities that exist in every single person's life the potential for a personal singularity or the inevitability of the personal singularity

known as death there can also be personal singularities that can happen prior to death in the form of an awakening experience and in the same way that McKenna you know theorized in a probably ridiculous way that this event in the future is so potent that it's blasting back particles through time which manifests in the form of novelty in the same way if you just start letting yourself imagine that there is a version of yourself currently existing outside the time space continuum that is awoken and that the power of that awakening was so potent in your subjective experience that there are actual tachyon particles there are actual particles of awakening being blasted backwards through time that are manifesting as these minute personal

epiphanies that can happen if you just let yourself be open to them then you can start the process right now at this very moment you know yeah yeah yeah well I think though it's it's just something that's a little disheartening often it's not so much that I want to do these people exclusively in a place like New York for instance but but there are quite a lot of people I feel that they I almost get the sense just in talking with them let's say about psychedelics or or in the case of like like you know just seeing what they might what kind of practices they might have to try and open up those sort of channels and and not that often but once in a while do seem to come across or these these resistances where people seem afraid to to explore or open up those those

parts themselves like I kind of get that sense once in a while that like that because there is so much baggage like our species is carrying around so much baggage that we're we're almost become afraid of our own natures because I because we see so many ways that we're behaving badly around the world too that I think that that people I don't know maybe it's just that I'm also seeing like instances of this ridiculous shit that we're seeing now with like trigger warnings and whatever like like people seeing themselves as these extremely fragile things that if they were to start really kind of like facing these things about themselves that make them anxious or or uncomfortable uh that somehow they would have like a meltdown like it like you know the idea of coming across trigger

warnings for example like NPR when they're about to use a certain word and and they're just covering their bases that anyone hearing it doesn't all sound spiraling into some kind of panic attack like I wonder what that's about I wonder what where we're at when we're you know when we're when we're kind of collectively seem so afraid to kind of do that sometimes heavy lifting of looking inwards well nobody wants to die and those motherfucking anxiety attacks are it's preferable for a lot of people to have a body made up of anxiety attacks anger and terror than to be nothingness yeah you know so like you know there's part of you knows if I start dealing with the fact that the very the the building blocks of my personality and for a lot of people those building

blocks consist of ridiculous um uh ridiculous mottos such as I just hate people there's you know what I mean there's people who say that I hate people I just hate people I hate people the world is shit the world is shit the world is shit people rip you off people rip you I hate the fucking bullshit world all those things these building blocks of a self of course to say you hate people you have to be hurting so bad or to say the world sucks you're hurting so bad or to to whatever the thing is that you're bugling out about how miserable wretched and rancid the society that you're in or the world that you're in or whatever it is that you're in I speak from my own personal experience which is that in general if I'm uh uh uh blasting some external

aspect of the world usually it's coming from a pain state uh but people want to be in that pain state because it's a state and and and it's preferable to statelessness or it's preferable to just a real simple trippy thing to realize is that um awareness and uh phenomena arise simultaneously so you know you know that idea which is so that like here you have the state of awareness which is what you are and you're rising up into the state of awareness at every single moment or infinite sense experiences that are happening right but what what you know what I mean but what you really are is that state of nothingness within which these experiences are rising but the experiences are what you call yourself so anyway that's preferable to be that right to

to have your fingers dug into the fucking matter of the world into the phenomena of the world and to have your roots just dug as deep as you possibly can into that dead soil is preferable it's better to be a desert plant dug into into this material world than to blend into space and become all things for some people it's death right we don't want to die right right but it's it's the funny thing about um existence is the fact that all like absolutely if there's one voyage we're all going to take you know it's that's the one universal thing but it's also the one universal thing that in certain cultures we we want to shield ourselves from you know like like there's a I find I find the weirdest practice you know in the here in the west especially when they when they embalm bodies

when they die so as to sort of resemble them as when they were alive and yeah it's for the people who you know when they if they do awake of course you know that does make some sense but but I remember like when my dad passed away we passed away five four or five years ago now and I remember you being um because he was a very funny dude up my my dad was very kind of happy go lucky and didn't take things too seriously some things he did of course but but but by and large he found comedy in a lot of things right and I remember you know when he passed away at home um because he was he was pretty ill but we wanted to take care of him at home and like I flew up from New York up to Ottawa where it happened and just a week before and then I was

there when when he died it was really weird man like like him going from he was pretty sick so it's not as if though he looked well right before but then you know I went to the bathroom I remember I went to the bathroom he was alive I went to the bathroom I came out and my mom was there and she's like I think he just went and he had gone he had just died just then right it was so bizarre man it was really really weird like how like the difference between the life force that was in this man who was granted quite sick versus that life force just having disappeared altogether like it was really like it was a very distinct thing it was it was very very odd to see you know and but but then you know uh he goes to a funeral home and there's this weird process it's some kind

of thing maybe it's it's some kind of legal thing they have to do in in Canada I'm not sure I haven't looked into it but but like for the funeral home for us to like decide what kind of casket or whatever we want to do with his body we have to actually we had we had to of course choose there but but they had embalmed his body they had like like doctored his body so as to have like even like a little smirk on his face I remember I remember my mom and I like we had done our like grieving was part of it of course but like enough that when we were there we saw my dad's body and and in this state that they had sort of doctored him up into and we realized that my my dad if he had been in the room with us he would be like gaffa laughing at how he appeared like he just he didn't look at

all like himself and both me and my mom are like this is this is kind of fucking hilarious in a weird way right because it's somehow like like I don't know I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there's this kind of like sterility with regards to to death that somehow like even when death has come we have to still sort of masquerade it as like oh there's still no look part of them is still alive look at this look at this you know the rosy cheeked body that we're about to incinerate like whereas whereas I think that if you if you then contrast it with like the the tradition they have somewhere in Tibet where they have vultures eat the corpse oh yeah that's the best like that's what that's and and then you know like there's of course the practice

with some buddhist monks where they actually sit by an open grave and they they they meditate on the decomposing body because it it all like both of those practices I think they're mirrors you know like you see this process happening that happens in all of nature all around us you know like like just changing the seasons well like you said earlier on in the conversation like like a a garden in the winter looks shriveled and fucked up you know but but you know that what it is is just that it's it's a dormant it's dormant but it's it's exactly and dormant is a great word to use because it's it's sleeping it's as if though like like I had a mushroom trip but I keep going back to mushroom trips it sounded ridiculous but uh but I had one um like maybe a month ago up in my

up in my property where you know it's it's it had just been a big snowfall here with like snow right around Thanksgiving and I remember sitting there in the field kind of seeing all these trees around me with no leaves on them where in the summer they're just super lush and it's like really really like fertile and I remember just thinking that like the the kind of energy that I'm feeling here the kind of sounds that I'm hearing from from the forest the way it is now is just that it's it's almost as if though this forest in this field it's it's sleeping under this blanket and dreaming of spring like it's dream of its next state but but it's not the end of any state like the same with the human life is that that we we tend to think of it in such strange terms

whereas then we look at nature and we we apply a completely different kind of paradigm on it that that's somehow a withering plant that then you know is is reborn I guess if you want to use that word the next season somehow human beings are excluded from that process when people think of death people think of death as being such a permanent thing well it's certainly a universal thing like we all share it but but I don't know I don't know where I'm at with with regards to thinking of it as this like cataclysmic end of anything I had and what's what's kind of funny or not funny maybe but what's sort of uh relieving about it is that it's something we all share there's absolutely nobody that not even Ray Kurzweil bless his heart is gonna escape that

process that's gonna be sad when Ray Kurzweil if Ray Kurzweil that's gonna be sad if Ray Kurzweil dies well yeah I guess from whichever standpoint look at it in a way though it's it's it's odd because I I haven't I haven't been keeping up too much with what his whole thing is like how it's been going but but I wonder I mean you know the idea of eventually plugging our consciousness into some kind of immortal thing uh I don't know I wonder what the what the sort of the Buddhist minds I would have to say about that that is that maybe some kind of if that were to ever happen you know will that be some kind of strange natural manifestation yes it will be I think I actually heard a cool Buddhist take on it

it was similar which is that uh you know the idea of like making artificial intelligences that are capable of self-determination and are indistinguishable from human intelligence that Kurzweil's talking about uh at this rich meditation retreat I was at this amazing woman Mirabai was telling me how she was talking to this llama a boot not the animal but a Buddhist teacher about uh this stuff and he was saying well you know if you look at the Tibetan Book of the Dead or you look at the idea that there are all these potentialities that exist that these disembodied potentialities that we call souls these sort of like quantum ripples that have the tendency of moving into a fertilized egg and growing into a human

which is a probably a rather poor explanation of the the Tibetan idea which is much deeper but that's that a rudimentary that's kind of the idea so in the same way if you can create a vessel suitable for these ripples that we call our souls or identities or whatever to become embodied in then souls will just start going into machines so and and uh I think that when I see somebody die what I'm seeing is a radio getting turned off it's it's obvious that a transmission has just been shut off it's like it's no different from when I turn my tv it's like it's no different than when the music stops playing it's just like there was something here now it's completely gone as far as its manifestation in the field of matter called the human body but

that thing man it I think theoretically you could tune into you could tune into the various personality frequencies that exist at all times I and I think that we can you know people say the reincarnation is this kind of dying born dying born dying born I think it's more correct to think that there is a specific frequency an egoic frequency a karmic frequency which you are and I am and everyone you know are and everyone every individual that you know is rather and and uh that these this frequency is constantly being emanated into the universe from where I don't know and why I don't know but I think that that frequency of self is more than likely being tuned into by a lot of different receivers not just your body and that's where

you get into like multiverse theory and stuff or the idea that like you know there's an infinite number of universes through which this frequency or transmission that you call yourself is being exploded into at all times and in various dimensions and other aspects of parts of the multiverse that you that is currently manifesting in the form of your body here on earth is being manifested maybe in the way a leaf blows into the sky or maybe it's you know what I mean it's like it's being manifest in a lot of different ways not just your your meat body yeah well well and you know with uh something like again like ayahuasca the experience that I had that was kind of like my the game changer for me as far as like understanding what or at least getting a glimpse into understanding

what the hell this thing is and why people would should and and are using it you know is that um you get a glimpse into into that idea that that you are just you are a you're really just a particle operating in a huge and a vast almost I mean suffice to say like like infinite kind of system like it really it hammers home this weird kind of funny like mendolic idea which is that you're both utterly insignificant but also your actions your your life here can be very important it's a really weird like double thing where like it really stresses that that's why I think that these things do kind of get to the root of like if somebody has real problems that they are maybe neglecting to to contend with in every day like they will take you to those things because there

there seems to be this emphasis on on appreciating how insanely amazing it is to have this kind of incarnation to do to be able to live and manipulate space and matter with these hands and to be able to perceive it with our senses and stuff but at the same time it's it inevitably always kind of it is a kind of a slap in the face also like reminding us like but look you are you are in the grand scheme of things nothing to stop worrying so fucking much I love it so cool it's really cool it's just like yeah what you have is a precious thing yeah but don't get too caught up it's like if you're eating it at the mansion of some incredibly wealthy person right and you're like you're ignoring the generosity of whatever incredible meal he's offered you well that's very rude but simultaneously

if you're sitting there drinking the wine and you keep talking about this wine is so good I can't believe he gave me this your finest wine oh god it's going to become uncomfortable for everyone involved yeah exactly it's it's and this is where like you know again maybe using the term like archaic revival might might fit though in that if you think of like old old kind of philosophy such as like Taoism well Taoism is that it's flow it's it's about just flowing with it because at the end of the day there's nothing else to be done but flow if you if you try and swim against the current well all you're gonna do is is splash around but it's not gonna change the current itself you know so so I just feel like that's why like like maybe it's maybe it's high time that we

did do kind of like uh you know maybe with the aid of these things that are now coming out of the jungle en masse and like just just generally like uh the the fact that people are opening up to these these kind of individual experiences that then may spill into the rest of their lives in some way like maybe it is a high time for us to like to really take stock of that and say that it's not just it's not just a matter of like looking forward to the next manifestation of technology like the next iPhone or some shit as if though that's gonna be our salvation or we're looking just in that direction certainly I think that technology in the way it's going is getting really trippy like it's there there are things that one could call psychedelic about what's being done with with

technology right but at the same time if we're only ever living through this kind of external externalized experience such as like a screen in front of us or whatever rather than going into those experiences on some deeper level I think that one without the other is is not the whole picture you know no you got to get out of the kiddie pool eventually man I mean that's just what it comes down to and but you don't have to be in a rush either it's like yeah there's there's not a rush there's not a imperative as much as like the mind would like to the mind will either make you think it's all bullshit or it's the most important thing ever like it's never gonna just be like oh I don't know it's probably nothing the mind doesn't want the mind wants a wants it wants

it to be for nothing or for something it can't accept the kind of liminal place that I think Taoism and Buddhism is pointing to but man Martin holy shit we've done two hours oh shit yeah how cool what a one how wonderful to get to meet you I'm so grateful that you that you took the time to be on this podcast and I really hope you'll come back on again I don't and I'd love to man and thanks again like I really mean it like I think I think what you're doing with this podcast is it's a really it's a it's just it's in keeping with what we're talking about here too I feel like it's a really really like it's a very important thing for a lot of people to have access to to your thoughts and that and that you know the fact that you have this

kind of forum for people to be just just openly speaking with ideas and stuff it's it's amazing well I'm then I must be the luckiest person on earth I really must be because all like I just get to have conversations with great artists like yourself that illuminate me and that's so I just feel I just feel incredibly lucky and thank you so much for for saying all that but yeah for me it's just like holy shit I just get to talk to the coolest people ever so that makes me really happy and also thanks so much for for Babel this book is really great and folks listening who are uh have been fascinated by what the things that Martin has been talking about you got to check out his book where can people not to like put in too obvious a plug man but this this is something

that like you know your your art uh has become a real big part of my life and oh cool man I'd like other people to be able to experience it too yeah no thanks a lot man well yeah you can um I'm selling it actually through my website like we're gonna we are gonna set up through my publisher too we're gonna do an amazon link and stuff but we uh we kicked it out of the gates with uh with a kickstart campaign end of october I think so we're still getting the logistics together as far as like like setting up some type of different platform but for the time being I mean if I um I have the book on my websites it's I have a weird name though so it's uh it's it's Martin and the W I T T F O O T H dot com and there's a store section on there um and if you click that link

uh the first thing at the top of the page is the book and then I have a few prints and stuff up there as well so yeah beautiful and if people want to follow me on on facebook it's uh I think the easiest thing would just be just look up my name I have it's I don't know if you have the same scenario happening but like there's like a facebook like regular page that has a friends limit which is really dumb in my opinion like it's I think it caps at like five thousand or something and then there's like a like an artist page so I have both of those um but I don't even know like I put the same content on both I don't know I've I've I've I've sort of fallen away from Facebook because the friend limit thing made it like yeah weird and then I just sort of just started using twitter

and stuff but maybe it's fixed whatever that weirdness was so that I don't know well I'll pull just send me the links folks if you want to connect to Martin go to uh dunkatrustle.com and there'll be links in the comment section of this podcast um cool man wow this is this has been really awesome you know I I'm gonna be coming I'm gonna be doing a live podcast uh in New York okay at least two in April are you gonna be around I am yeah yeah oh cool man maybe we maybe we can figure something out I'll do that we awesome yeah yeah and that's very nice man I'd love to if you're here for for a few days I'd love to have you upstate too just for you know a day or two if you want that would be cool yeah man I would like to see your the dormant

fields through the lens of mushrooms I'm terrified of mushrooms these days though man I've I'm more of a but I theoretically I don't really mean it because I've heard that these things are prohibitive but I'm more of an acid man myself but um maybe I'll just cut that out Martin God bless you we will talk again soon thank you so much for coming on the show thanks a lot Duncan cool hold on one second thanks for listening everybody that was Martin Whitforth go to his website martinwithforth.com all links will be at DuncanTrustle.com if you like the podcast give us a nice rating on iTunes pet your dog rub your mother be sure to stay in tune with the eternal frequency of love that exists in the universe and don't get bitten by a monkey in a third world country also a big thanks

to Warby Parker for sponsoring this episode pick up some new glasses at warbyparker.com Hare Krishna