Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #119 Alex and Allyson Grey

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

Alex Grey is an American visionary artist, author, teacher, and Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. His wife Allyson Grey, a conceptual abstract painter and co-founder of CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, has long been a mentor and influencer of the contemporary Visionary Art movement. I'm so excited to be joined by them both to discuss an array of topics and their new museum opening called Entheon.   Connect with Alex| Website- https://www.alexgrey.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/alexgreycosm/ YouTube - https://bit.ly/31IKsV7 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AlexGreyCoSM/ Purchase Artwork - https://bit.ly/341UQcb   Connect with Allyson| Website - https://www.allysongrey.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/allysongreycosm/?hl=tr Twitter - https://twitter.com/allysongreycosm Purchase Artwork - https://shop.cosm.org/collections/allyson-grey   Show Sponsors|   AWAY Travel https://www.awaytravel.com/ use codeword Kyle at checkout for $20 off any suitcase   Native    https://www.nativecos.com/   Use codeword Kyle at checkout for 20% off your first purchase    Onnit Golden Ticket Sweepstakes Get 10% off all foods and supplements at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/   Vital Farms https://vitalfarms.com/ghee (For a chance to win Onnit Products and a 1 year supply of Vital Farms Ghee for free   Caldera Lab https://calderalab.com/kyle Use codeword Kyle at checkout for 20% off your first purchase of (The Good)     Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Website | https://www.kingsbu.com Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk    Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY          

Hello, friends. Today we have a very special episode with two people that I've been following for many years, Alex and Allison Gray. You may be familiar with them if you listened to them on Joe Rogan. I think they've been on a couple of times, or if you listened to them recently on the Aubrey Marcus podcast, or if you've ever smoked DMT, done acid, or done any type of deep psychedelic work and come across some of their amazing visual artwork online and notice, oh shit, I've been there before. That's something that I recognize. And I think with Alex and Allison Gray, the thing that's special about them is that they're truly doing the work. And what I mean by that is they're not just taking medicine and getting downloads and drawing really cool and beautiful artwork. They're doing the work.

They're creating something very special at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. And I had a great time and truly just felt blessed to be in their presence and to see everything they're putting together at their facility out in upstate New York. I went out there with my homeboy and podcast producer, Ryan Giles, and we got the full tour and really got to see what they're putting together. It's going to be 12,000 square feet, this new project that they have called Entheon, and three levels, 4,000 square feet each, featuring some of the best original artworks from some of the best visionary artists in the world, including a lot of their own original artwork. And we had some amazing

conversations. Most I got on camera. Some, unfortunately, were held after the show. But I ended up buying this piece. If you watch the YouTube video or if you see the photo that we used to promote this on Instagram, there's a piece that Alex did on the modern history of LSD and psilocybin. And it goes through everybody who's been a major player in the game from as far back as the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece, all the way up to, of course, Albert Hoffman with LSD. And interwoven into that is Maria Sabina, the first Oaxacan Xamana Mama or Curandera, whatever we would call her, from Oaxaca, Mexico, who served Gordon Wasson, I believe the first gringo to be given the medicine, at least in that culture.

And of course, he had promised not to talk about it or put it in the news. He came back and that photo that they took of the Oaxacan mushroom went on the cover of Life magazine, I believe. And the Western world was put on blast. They were awoken to the fact that this substance now exists. So I thought, who better to ask about the modern history of psychedelics than Alex and Allison Gray, who lived through it all. They lived through the 60s, they lived through the 70s, and are here today to see this new renaissance taking place. They know all the players, personal friends of Terrence McKenna, and a lot of the big names from past and present. And it's a beautiful conversation. Ienna and a lot of the big names from past and present.

And it's a beautiful conversation. I think it adds a lot because I've listened to them on Rogan's and of course on Aubrey's and highly recommend you check out those podcasts. We'll link to them in the show notes for you. If you want to get the backstory on what got them into this, please check out the first episode they did on the Joe Rogan experience. But I think this definitely adds a new layer to the conversation. And it certainly was a conversation where I learned a lot in. I know you guys are going to dig this one. There's a number of ways you can support the podcast.

First and foremost, click subscribe. Never miss an episode. Secondly, leave us a five-star review. If you do so now on October 31st, which is approaching very quickly, I will be selecting one winner who leaves a five-star rating and tells me one or two reasons the show has helped them in life. It can be anything, anything at all. And I will read that aloud and you will win a 30-minute Zoom call, any and all questions answered, or we can just shoot the shit. Whatever you want, however you want to spend that 30 minutes with me is up to you. But we'll be announcing that

October 31st, picking one winner. And then, of course, check out our sponsors. We've got some really good ones. Of course, you know I work here at Onnit, and we've got a massive sweepstakes going on right now. We've just sold over a million bottles of AlphaBrain. And to celebrate that milestone, we wanted to do something special for you, the customer.

So in the spirit of Willy Wonka, we are running the AlphaBrain Golden Ticket Sweepstakes. Inside in the spirit of Willy Wonka, we are running the Alpha Brain Golden Ticket Sweepstakes. Inside each new purchase of Alpha Brain, you'll receive a golden ticket, a special pass that gives you access to one of thousands of prizes, including a grand prize experience, an all-expense paid trip to Onnit HQ in Austin, Texas. I'm going to be here for that. Aubrey's going to be here for that. You're going to get the royal treatment. You're going to get to work out here, jump in the sauna, maybe even hit a cold plunge, all the cool shit that you can do here at Onnit and in Austin. And all you got to do is go to Onnit.com slash Kyle. You're going to get 10% off. You buy a 30 count or a 90 count bottle of

AlphaBrain, and that's what's going to enter you in. There's 10 winners are going to receive a bottle of Total Mitochondria. 100 winners are going to receive a bottle of Total Mitochondria. 100 winners are going to receive a signed copy of Own the Day, Own Your Life, one of my favorite books from Aubrey Marcus, and many other cool prizes. So check that out. Also, our dudes, Vital Farms,

they're right down the street. I've been eating their eggs and their grass-fed butter for years, and they've been serving it right here in the Onnit Cafe. They're now making one of the best products I've ever used, and it is a very clean and versatile butter oil that you can use for every culinary need. It's made by cooking down butter to remove the water and milk solids, clarifying, which makes this clarified butter, better known as ghee, G-H-E-E.

And these guys have been doing it for years. They know exactly what it means to have a cow in their natural state, pastured, free to graze, move about, getting direct sunlight, drinking clean water, and of course, never any antibiotics or nasty shit used in their products. Never any antibiotics or nasty stuff used in their livestock. This is one of my favorite products. I use it to cook with. It's got a high smoke point. I'll throw it into shakes. I throw it on top of my steak. That's probably one of my favorite ways. After the steak comes out, just toss a little of this ghee on top.

They come in a couple different flavors. They've got original and Himalayan pink salt. And you can get it all at Whole Foods in a squeeze bottle. Or you can go to vitalfarms.com slash ghee. That's vitalfarms.com slash G-H-E-E for a chance to win Onnit products and a year's supply of Vital Farms ghee. Next, we got our dudes Caldera.

Now, I'm gonna be perfectly honest. I'm 37 years old. I don't think of myself as a man's man, but I also just don't really give a shit about, well, I care about personal hygiene, but I guess I just expect to age with grace. I expect to have wrinkles. Men generally look better as they age. If they take care of themselves, you look at a guy like Jack Nicholson or who was the guy who played his

boss in the original Batman? I don't know. If you remember it, fucking write me on Instagram. He was a bad dude and he looked great into his old years. But one of the things that I've noticed since I've started using Caldera Labs, the good is the fact that my face not only looks a little younger, it feels a little younger. And that feels good. It's invigorating and energizing. And I'm not sure exactly what the scents are from the essential oils that they have in this product. But when I rub it onto my face and my beautiful bald head, I just feel better. It wakes me up. I feel good throughout the day, and it's a fantastic product. Now, here's the deal. You can get 20% off your first Caldera Lab purchase of the good by going to calderalab.com slash Kyle or use code word Kyle at checkout. That's calderalab.com

slash Kyle or use code word Kyle at checkout for 20% off your first order. This stuff's fantastic. Thank you guys for tuning into the show today with Alex and Allison Gray. And I hope you guys dig it as much as I did. All right, we've been clapped in and I'm quite, quite excited. We've been given the grand tour, Ryan and I, of your amazing, amazing place here. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle and Ryan. It's been an honor to show you around. I'm glad you got to see it in the summertime.

And we're getting so close to opening Entheon. You can, you know, you can feel the spaces. They look like gallery spaces now and and uh so uh but you could see also the elevator was in pieces and uh is yet to be assembled you know so there's a few things like the 800 pound doors that are not quite being here yet but they're being finished and so they're all underway. And so it'll be probably a few more months before the inside is taken care of. For the installation. That's the next phase. Well, we want to get everything done

and then we put in the art. And then private tours for people like you come back when the art's in. We'd love to show it to you oh i'll be back for sure especially since aubrey hasn't been here we we gotta come out for oh yeah for full moon time right yeah when the art's up and you'll see the sacred mirrors in that uh chapel area then uh i think that it'll be doing more of what we want it to do because it's a sacred space, it's a place that honors the sacred.

And a lot of people in what I'd say are global community of people who have seen the other side into the multiple dimensions of reality uh where is our temple we see it burn every year at burning man you know but so like i think that in in this uh a period we're going to see all over the world, little, uh, areas where artists create, uh, sacred, uh, zones, you know, portals to these other dimensions, you know, for, for fun, but also for kind of sacred uplifting, like, uh, these, uh, the Antheon Sanctuary of Visionary Art will house artwork that is aimed at depicting the psychedelic, visionary, mystical experience. and considering as a reorienting alignment of our species with a higher dimension of being that is the source of truth and goodness and beauty and all of the good things of life and the source of love. So, and ultimately, when we journey,

we find the source of creation within ourselves that's also the heart of the universe. And with that kind of foundational cosmic realignment and orientation like all the ancient civilizations had because they were all psychedelic. May I say that the art of that experience is like the relic or artifact of that experience.

So these are the artists, the visionary artists are the ones that are going in, seeing, and bringing back. And the most skilled among them, and the most talented, and the most trained, are more able to represent that world. And so that's what we're filling the Entheon with, is the art of that experience. Art of bringing it back from the inner realms onto

the outer plane. It's symbol makers that we are. We can only create a vestige, a symbol of what we've been, what we've seen. Maybe it's just like a glimmering but we're bringing it back. From psychonautic journey to what we've seen maybe it's just a like a glimmering but we're bringing it back from

psychonautic journey to artifact there you go how do you extrude the multiple dimensions of reality into an object so it acts like the tip of an iceberg or a little little worm sticking out of a hole that you know is like a really long thing, you know. It's like... Or the mushrooms coming up out of the dirt. There's just a rhizome, a net of beings under the ground, and then the little fruits come up, and that's what the psychedelic fruits are. They're just the beauty that comes out of the network. And it is quite beautiful. You know, when you guys talk about the visionary artists bringing this

thing back from their own personal experience with Source, it reminds me of the original maestros and curanderos in the Amazon who would drink the medicine for the tribe and no one else would participate. And they would come back with the healing word, with what they had learned. And they would do like the art tapestries that we have here. And they would sing to people, the ikros, and they would heal without anyone partaking. And I always found that interesting that you could still have a transformative healing experience, even without partaking. But now, obviously, the world has changed and we're very fortunate to be able to partake in the medicine. And I think that accessibility is changing everything. But there's so much I want to get into with you guys. I listened to your podcast with Aubrey a second time on the way up here. And there was something that really resonated

with me. He had talked about when someone says, and I've said this in the last week at least once, that's why it kind of knocked me upside the head. If someone says, I'm a spiritual person, but I'm not a religious person, and I've said that, then that's not necessarily ringing true. Because it's almost as if, you know, Aubrey brought up the point like God is a sticky word for a lot of people because it's been misused and misrepresentative of what God is. And a lot of the issue people have around that word is that God is the great judger who's going to make you burn in hell versus God is love. And so much of what I see from both of your art is love.

It just fucking rings true, like just right from the walls. And I'm looking at Ram Dass right now and Albert Hoffman, and I feel love in that art. I think we don't want to give these very powerful words up to the fundamentalists. That's why Alex and I are really a stand for using those words, religion and God, because first of all, religion means to tie back. So it means to tie back to your original source. So, but what is religion? Religion is a bunch of people who want to create a community

around their spiritual core. And the spiritual core is the core of their spiritual experience. And so these people that come here, we have a lot of people come here and feel really at home here. That's because they can talk and feel like they're with people who've had this incredible, powerful spiritual experience. And people just intuitively have wanted to attach that experience to a place. It's like find the others. It's like in close encounters of the Third Kind, when they all are looking for that special rock. And they're from all different places in the

world. They come here looking for the others. So I think that we don't want to give those words away to the fundamentalists. We want to recreate them. When I first saw God, I was agnostic. I was agnostic. I like traditional Judaism, but I, you know, I never had an experience of God, and God was not a man with a beard, obviously. So then I was in this experience of dark quiet, like Ram Dass told me in Be Here Now. He said, try going into a dark room and having this experience with maybe

a little spiritual music and some silence and close your eyes. And then after, you know, tripping in every other way, you know, and having a lot of evolutionary, you know, personal exposure, I saw God. And it was there. It was all over the walls and it was washing all over my body. And I was seeing the secret writing and it was really speaking to me through the secret writing. It was a force and it was interconnecting all beings and things. It had nothing to do with the gender. It was genderless. And so therefore, I could buy that because it was never, when you're a woman, it doesn't just go by you that God is a man. It doesn't just like, you don't think about it.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. That's not my God then because God is within. I'm a woman. And so I have woman inner thoughts. And so anyway, I had nothing to do with that. God was a force. It was light. It interconnected. It connected all things. It didn't make divisions like men, women.

It was all things are one. So if that's all true, and we all keep thinking that's true, that was God. And I thought this is what people call God. That's the word that they use, G-O-D. Just three symbolic letters that mean all these different things to different people. What it means to me is what I have experienced.

Whoops. We're still here. Ryan's having some technical difficulties, but we'll keep going. We're just fine. God has spoken. God spoke. Oh, my God. God's singing again.

That's terrible. He sat down again. I love it. That cord's underneath your butt. There we go. Oh, that's the problem. There we go. All right.

We should just leave it in. The Lao Koon of cords chords well but but you god religion what about that well look there there are supercharged words and probably never more so than today when people are so desperately looking for something that is of substantial foundation and also something that connects them with their wider family. It's all understandable how the sociological functions of religion have maintained you know the some truths for for so long without sacrament but um once you get a taste of a psychedelic sacrament then you're the eyes of your heart and mind and third eye and whatever, the thousand eyes of your top chakra, depending on your dosage, I guess,

will reaffirm this connection with the infinite divine cosmic intelligence at the source of creation that is just at work in everything and it becomes so revealed to you. And that is tied back to that creative source. You can use the term God, but if you don't like it, you can say ultimate mystery. You, if you're a Buddhist, you won't like the, the term of, uh, a God, but there is always the, the Dharma, the Dharma is the divine intelligence of the cosmos that wove

it all, that we're all intimately one with. And so that source that wove us is woven into all of the world religions from the very beginning. And to me, the earliest religions are the caves, where artists, shamansans who had been tripping were trying to get some of what was inside out. You could start grunting, you could start, you know, gesturing and things, but how were you going to share what blazes is going on in your mind?

You know, and so this, the attempt to share soul to soul as deeply as possible came through first, I believe in these pictograms and the, the petroglyphs and all of the things that we see for tens of thousands of years in the caves. And along with that, we find the Egyptian cultures and things, we have the caves where early mushroom religious cult probably was tripping and interacting with plant spirit allies and also perhaps other beings from other dimensions because they have a lot of other dimensional beings also on these cave walls so so these are the prototypes of all temples their encounters with strange special beings elevated beings and

those encounters are memorialized in the sacred spaces and so I Want to say there's the source of religion and it was psychedelic so we're in a sense, reclaiming the origins of religion by going back to its roots. If you look to Eastern civilization or Western civilization or the entire South American religious centers, you have psychedelics all over it. So since psychedelics were such an important part of the foundations of religion, shouldn't we continue to explore them?

Tie back. Tie back. That's what I think. To the original source. It's the primary religious experience. It's the primary religious experience. It's not the secondary where you have to go through a priest or somebody else. There's no middleman. No middleman. Yeah, there's no middleman. You're right there with God.

And I think that just makes us all that much more enlightened and we just have more respect for each other and for the earth. I mean, this is what's happened since the psychedelic movement is this. The whole ecological movement didn't exist when I was going to school in the 60s. You didn't even pretty much know about that so much. I mean, you know, they got rid of some of the poisons and things like that, but it was just beginning. Yeah, we were talking before the show started about kind of how people look at things differently.

And if you have, you know, like Nixon and this fear based around psychedelics and the hippie movement, you know, people get coined as, oh, they're not going to work and they're not going to contribute to society. And then the flip side of that or the real side of that is this contentment that we have with life and appreciation and gratitude that we get from these ceremonies. And from there, that generally widens the lens from what I do with myself to what I do in community, what I do with the world, what I do with Gaia herself. And from there, we start to shift outward. And maybe it doesn't mean that we work in a factory any longer,

but it doesn't mean we stop work altogether. And if that's someone's choice, then fucking so be it. You want to go to a mountain and meditate for the rest of your life? Cool. There's no issue with that. I know people who have worked in factories their whole life. Two friends of ours just retired after working in a post-serial factory. They loved it there. Okay. So don't think that it's a community and those people get along and they have their dramas and whatever. I don't know. Some people like that. I've had family members who've worked in factories.

So anyway, it's, you know, whatever works for you. But still, you want to serve somebody. And so how can you serve? And so people get together around that to try to be of service to each other like you are by doing a podcast like this or helping people with their fitness. I think that it's part of the new art of reality that by the podcast makes the encounters and conversations that we have into works of art

that are shareable. And so in that way, they become a context for people to examine those, the aspects of their lives that relate to the people who are speaking together. And so it gives us and returns us to the platonic kind of academic, conversational, Socratic questioning and peeling back things. So I think that a lot more integration of difficult and complex materials are possible in the context of intelligent conversations, which you've been having, Aubrey, Joe, all the really great podcasters

have had a history of great conversations with people. And that's a work of art. So thank you. Thank you, guys. Anytime my name is in the same sentence as Joe and Aubrey, I'm happy. Wow. So thank you, guys. Look, I have the great Albert Hoffman and the great Richard Albert slash Ram Dass

right in front of me. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the lineage because this was before my time and I've only read about it. But talk about how these things came to be back in the mainstream and where you've seen them progress. But can you walk us through a brief history of psychedelics returning to the Western world? Well, I think that the return is really heralded most... the beginning of the psychedelic science really is 1897 and what was happening was that um arthur

hefter hefter was a jewish chemist who lived in Berlin, and he had received a peyote cactus. And so he was being asked to discover what was the active ingredient in the peyote cactus. And so after a while, he discovered and named the active alkaloid of mescaline, which was the first psychedelic really distilled in the laboratory. And that kind of began psychedelic science. Now, it wasn't, and of course, I think it was 1913 or something like that, Merck patented MDMA. That early? on Christmas Day. Wow. But it wasn't really used as a pharmaceutical.

And it was used in other ways. And so it wasn't until the 60s and then later reintroduced by Shulgin. How could it be used in other ways? What other ways are you thinking? Now we'll have to examine it. What do you mean it wasn't pharmaceutical? People had to take it orally. Camera equipment, camera development and stuff like that. Oh, you mean like just as a chemical,

it was used in other ways. Interesting. Research chemistry. And so it's very interesting then in 1938 Albert Hoffman was a chemist in a Sandoz pharmaceutical in Basel Switzerland and he was working with of the newly stabilized ergot alkaloids. Ergot is a fungus that grows on all grains, but also on rye. And so this was rye ergot.

And they made a base that was somewhat stabilized ergotamine tartrate, I believe. And from that base of the fungus uh he grew many different derivatives including lsd25 and tested it onto animals nothing happened that was november 16th also terence mckenna's birthday 1938 november 16th okay so um they put it on the shelf because no special qualities are uh noted in lsd five years go by. And on April 16th. Bicycle day. No.

Not quite. Almost. On Friday, April 16th, Albert Hoffman hears what he calls a peculiar presentiment that he should remix LSD-25. Now, we're in the middle of the war. This is a very interesting timing. And Ralph Metzner made note of the fact that a few months earlier, not that much earlier, Enrico fermi had just discovered the fission that would lead to the atomic bomb so on april 16th albert hears the voice of lsd calling him that's what he said at his uh birthday event and when he was turned 100 you know he was trying to recount this why now are there thousands around me and has this had such an astounding importance so on that day he heard

the voice of lsd calling him and never before and never since have i heard such a voice he said so that was the only time i ever heard him like admit maybe there was an angel that told him to go back albert and mix this stuff up again so he mixed it up and according to legend and his own uh report that he had a few hours of very elevated imagination uh and post uh dealing with this which he can only explain by maybe he absorbed some of it somehow reminds me of how you feel when you microdose elevated imagination it wasn't i think outside the box yeah yeah and so it was a friday So that's why you got the 16th, now 17th, Saturday, 18th, now it's the 19th, April 19th. He goes back to work on a Monday. noted in his notebooks on 419, he decides to take what he thinks will be for sure a sub, you know, like you won't, a micro dose so small that you definitely won't have any effect.

And it was 250 millionths of a gram. Now, millions of a gram, but 250. Now that 250 mics, now we know that's a substantial dose but uh it you know at the time there was nothing active at that level well even now if you look at nothing active ayahuasca or or mushrooms you know psilocybin any of these things at 250 micrograms, like there's nothing that compares to that potency. No, exactly.

And so actually, you know, he started to laugh and it was like, it was kind of fun. And within an hour though, he fears he's dying. And, but he doesn't want to die in the lab you know and uh for numerous reasons you know and so but the only way to get home is with the bicycle because it's wartime and nobody drives and so he and his lab assistant who was a young lady i think she was 22 years old or something like followed she followed him home and he made good time according to her but according to him he felt he was barely moving you know but he you know made a beeline home and like got in

and she brought a doctor over and stuff like that who looked at him and basically said, you know, Albert, you're okay. Your pupils look a little dilated. You're not dying. And I think he was beginning to come down and he basically had an epiphany about, you know, his connection with chemistry. You know, as a child child he was looking around at all the beautiful meadows and flowers and things like that and and started to think like everything here it's so beautiful and it's all made of chemicals I want to understand that you know and so he recovered the source of his own interest in chemistry and so it no one would believe though that he had taken such a small dose of this thing you know and but his lab that this was something, you know, and then they kept

it under wraps, though, for a little while. It didn't get out during the war. Would have been a weird war. Would have changed things, for sure. We went to see his, well, the site of his home, and they have it marked in Basel, Switzerland. They have, you know, like actual, like, molded metal signs in English and in German that say the bicycle ride. This is the bicycle ride of Albert Hoffman.

They're very proud of it there, you know. He was a chemist for Sandoz Pharmaceutical. I mean, he was legitimate. He was alwaysandoz pharmaceutical i mean exactly no legitimate he was he was always though i think a very religious man and a very uh mystic mystical person and he demonstrated how mysticism and science can go together that really uh one is looking at a universe within one is looking at a universe outside of us. But it's the same faculty of consciousness that is observing both, and both are sacred. And so his, like, basically,

Sandoz didn't know what they had, and they started sending it out to different medical schools all over the world, including ones behind the Iron Curtain, like in Czechoslovakia, where Stanislav Grof was a medical student and a graduate student. And so he was the guinea pig that got introduced to, hey, what's this stuff? I don't know, but I'm willing to take it. Okay, let's try a strobe light, you know? And so he took his first dose of LSD as a Freudian,

and he came out no longer a Freudian. A Jungian, maybe. Yeah, it's like the strobe light began a different universe. Every time the strobe light would go on, a new universe would come into being, and he was like infinite consciousness immediately dawned in him, and he's explored uh consciousness uh and tried to create a cartography of the journeying mind because he analyzed thousands of people who had had journeys and reported back what they saw a lot of which the visionary artists are trying to portray

and he has always used visionary art hr gR. Giger, for instance, and his own art to demonstrate some of these sacred visions, you know, of the inner realms. And so... And then he was a scientist at the Maryland Psychiatric Center and... Spring Grove in Baltimore. And they had like all these studies.

Walter Pankey. And all these people were trying it, and everybody was talking about it. It was coming out in magazines and whatever. And that's when we came in. Right. Well, what happened in 1955? Gordon Wasson with his wife, Valentina Wasson,

who was Russian and very interested in mycology. He called himself a mycophobe, but he tried to get over it. And they went searching for the magic mushroom. They heard that it existed and they found their way to Oaxaca and they found their way to Maria Sabina, who surrendered the magic mushroom.

In a moment that I liken to the Adam and and God you know the finger touching each other you know that Michelangelo shows energy between the yeah they kind of with the shamanic cultures that have withheld the knowledge because the Christian uh uh Cruz basically uh came in and destroyed all the shamanic culture you know so they went withdrew to the hills don't tell uh the white people about this they'll they'll kill us you know so they had this wisdom but she shared it because he asked the in the right way way. But he promised her he wouldn't display it publicly. But they had a photographer, and within a year or two, it was on basically at Life magazine.

Life magazine. And so it's basically how a lot of people learned about the psychedelic mushroom to begin with. And that was also given to Albert Hoffman because he had discovered LSD they thought he might be able to distill what the active ingredient is in this magic mushroom so he named the alkaloid psilocybin and also citizen which is the active ingredients in the magic mushroom So can I just say that I really do think that the mushroom

wanted to be spread to the crazy monkeys up there in the Northern hemisphere that were like, like ruining the earth, the planet. And that it was basically, uh, they, they were like somehow going to have to connect with these crazy monkeys to clean up their ways. And I think that ever since then, the evolution toward seeing the earth as a precious resource that we need to protect and to change our ways, it's just evolving. It's just even now evolving.

It doesn't feel like it could be possibly fast enough but i really do feel that it was a it was an outgrowth of the psychedelic community yeah no doubt you see that with ayahuasca now the curanderos leaving their hometowns and bringing the medicine out to the world to the west to the modern civilization that's living uh as one side of your gaia painting portrays in fire and smoke and pollution and uh that's where it needs to shift right but i'm sorry i'm digressing no it's really it's true i was just uh ruminating on it because maria maria for one thing and she was the daughter of a priest as well christian maria sabina but. Maria Sabina. But I mean, in a sense,

she gave, because it's been hypothesized that early Christianity was also a mushroom cult, in the mushroom and the cross, if you ever come across that. But this relationship of the contact with higher consciousness through the mushroom coming through Maria. I have sometimes, some people might think it's irreverent to talk like this. I don't mean anything irreverent or negative in any way. But the idea of a second coming, to to my mind the first coming was when christ revealed the divinity of humanity and the second coming i always felt would be the revelation of the divinity of nature has to be that because there's no other way for us otherwise it has to be the revelation of the divinity of nature so what is the green jesus what is the green mary i think it's the uh planetary connection with these uh entheogens that allow us uh as plant

sacraments to see that what what the earth really wants of us is to wise up and to stop destroying the planet that is our host. And this is something we recover when we recover the sacredness of our earth. And this is one of the ways. Another way is just walk in the woods and see how good it feels. Immediately your negativities are discharged into the earth because the earth loves your negativity. It wants to take it from you. It wants to leave you with a positive field. The mushrooms heal the earth. They find that there are mushrooms growing,

there's fungus growing under Chernobyl, like in the earth in Chernobyl. It's covered with fungus. It's like it's there to soak up the toxins and to purify and clean the earth. Mushrooms are an amazing, amazing... Their divine intelligence itself. They're in the head of the earth.

The ergot, that's all fungus. I wanted you to just notice that the ergot over here in your painting. Yeah. Over here in your painting. That when they are looked at under a microscope, this ergot looks like psilocybin mushrooms. They look very much like a little field of psilocybin mushrooms. So they're really, when Gordon Wasson sent the mushroom

to Albert Hoffman to say, what is the chemical relationship between these substances? And Albert Hoffman says they're essentially the same, really. I mean, the... They're chemically related, certainly. The ingredient, you know, is basically the chemically related. So you have this picture of the molecule, whereas the mushroom may be slightly different, but have lots of resemblances.

Exactly. And they all resemble serotonin, the neurotransmitter, and that's why they do what they do. And although no one can explain why LSD does what it does, when it sits in the serotonin receptor site, a little protein bar comes over and holds it there for eight hours. Now, I don't know that there's anything else in the brain that ever goes into the brain that the brain holds onto in a neuroreceptor site. Now, I'd like to know, but I don't think there's any that I've ever heard of. And so that would make LSD into a very special substance that actually the brain itself recognizes as a special substance and does something with. And it holds to it. Why does it do that? You know, that's not poisoning. That's actually a contact, a kind of a contact with something. And then it releases it.

Yes, and then it lets go at a certain time. So we don't know what that is, but it makes something possible. You know, it makes meeting God possible. That's why the journey is long. The LSD journey is longer than- Psilocybin must work likewise, though. All right, guys, you've heard us breaking down some of the tryptamines and getting into a bit of the history around the gentleman from the Northeast who really started to put this stuff on the map. But real quick, I want to tell you about a couple of sponsors that we have. First is a company named Away. They've created thoughtful products designed to change how you

see the world. They started with the perfect suitcase, crafted with features that make travel more seamless. Now they offer a range of essentials that solve real travel problems. So all you have to think about is where you're heading next. Because getting away means getting more out of every trip to come. The suitcases are absolutely phenomenal. I've got the bigger carry-on. It's a carry-on, but it's just one size up that can still fit in the overhead bin. It's a lightweight and durable shell that's made to last for a lifetime of travel.

There's a 100-day trial that lets you try any Away product on the road. That means you get to try it out, try it on for size, and travel with it. A limited lifetime warranty means they'll fix or replace your bag if it ever gets damaged. This is huge. Four 360-degree spinner wheels guarantee a smooth ride, and it's TSA-approved combination locks keep your belongings safe. This is important. Even though you're going to have it on you, I don't want people rifling through my stuff and I travel with some very expensive equipment. They also give out free shipping on any order within the continuous US, Europe, and Australia. Want to see it for yourself? You can shop everything away at stores in New York, Austin, LA, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and London. But I just went online, I bought one of

their cases and it is absolutely phenomenal. So for $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com slash Kyle and use promo Kyle during checkout. That is $20 off any suitcase. Visit awaytravel.com slash Kyle and use promo code Kyle during checkout. And lastly is another awesome product from a company called Native. At Native, they've created simple, safe, and effective products that people use in the bathroom every day. They create products with trusted ingredients and trusted performance. Not convinced? Check out the 8,000 five-star reviews from their customers. There's no doubt this is one of the best deodorants I've ever come across. It's formulated without aluminum, parabens, or talc. It's filled with ingredients found in nature, such as coconut oil, shea butter, which is

a moisturizer, and emollient, and tapioca starch, which absorbs wetness. Never tested on animals, and there is, of course, free shipping and returns. Look, it works, plain and simple. Making the switch to an aluminum-free deodorant does not have to mean having to sacrifice on the product performance. As I mentioned, people love these guys. There's 8,000 plus five-star reviews. They've been on the Today Show, Elle Magazine, PopSugar, Refinery29, just to name a few, and it's all ingredients you know. It's worth it. Native is aluminum-free,

safe, and effective. And there's something for everyone. Native comes in a wide variety of enticing scents for men and women, plus the newly released limited edition seasonal scents throughout the year. They also offer an unscented formula and baking soda free formula for those with sensitivities. So for 20% off your first purchase, go to nativedeodorant.com and use code word Kyle at checkout. That's nativedeodorant.com, code word Kyle at checkout for 20% off your first purchase. And now back to the show. Yeah, they're all tryptamines. So where do Leary and Richard Alpert and the rest of the boys from the

Northeast start to get a hold of this? Well, so what happened in 1960 was that after the knowledge of the psilocybin mushroom was out, in 1960 uh timothy leary was i believe visiting mexico and a friend of his introduced him to psilocybin mushrooms now he was kind of between jobs and he had uh uh he had had some personal tragedies in his life he was traveling with his two young children and uh his wife had recently committed suicide and uh so he was being offered a position at harvard and uh in the summer i think he took uh this you know psilocybin mushroom. And as soon as that hit, he knew what he was going to do for the rest of his life was to explore psychedelics. And so he knew what he wanted to explore as soon as he got to Harvard as well, you know, that this was the area of interest. So now Richard Alpert, or soon to become Ram Dass,

did not know anything about that, and certainly no one else at Harvard did either. So Leary, within a couple of years, he made the acquaintance of some really awesome people that were there at Harvard, as you might imagine. Walter Pankey was one of his students. He was a medical student who was a psychiatrist, but a doctor, but also a doctor of divinity. And to get his doctorate divinity degree, he was doing a special research project, which had to do with psilocybin which

had just been discovered a few years earlier and named uh but so he had gotten some from sandos and uh tim leary was his uh was his advisor and uh they concocted the first uh basically, the Good Friday experiment, which happened on 420, a very special day, 1962, at the Marsh Chapel at Boston University. And so Walter Pankey, that was his name, and accompanied by at least 30 or so divinity students, some of which, like half of which got psilocybin, half of which got nicotinamide, something to stimulate them. But, you know.

Yeah, there'd be a feeling. It wasn't a placebo that was like a sugar pill where you'd have zero feeling. Right, exactly. But then they could differentiate. I would imagine, nicotinamide. And so it happened on Good Friday. And so that's why it's called the Good Friday experiment. It was meant to discover whether people who took a psychedelic would have a mystical experience. This was determined by a lengthy questionnaire, which the divinity students agreed to take before and after and in the follow-up.

And it took him a year to calculate everything. And he was a pretty tight and good scientist, but he was working by himself. They had to also come up with a criterion for the mystical experience. That was the most interesting thing about it. Very interesting. It's published in our divinity volume of Cosmic Journal of Visionary Culture, so you can always find it. But it's interesting. What makes it a mystical experience? And having that approved by all the different religions, that a mystical experience is actually a thing that includes these following characteristics. It's certainly at the foundation of every world religion.

There is no world religion without mystical experiences. They just, you know, mystical experiences cause religions. That's just, you know, and religions house... Moses sees the burning bush, you know, Muhammad rides the seventh heavens on the back of a rock. The, you know, human headed mule. You know, these are like visions that Mary sees an angel. Angel.

You know, that's the way religion start. Remember what happened to Albert? He heard a voice calling him. So I think it's the birth of a new wave of religion you know basically to reaffirm spiritual reality at a time when we desperately need it you know we need to know that there is a good there is truth there is beauty there is a higher world uh that is uh full of love and that wants us to work it out and uh recognize that this is a sacred planet you know i think it's a good thing oh it's definitely a good thing it's definitely a good thing so obviously how do we get to ron okay so so these guys okay so why are we doing this

okay so well at any rate uh uh they're they're uh walter Pankey gets a percentage of 65%. 65% of the divinity students that took this in a right sentence setting had a mystical experience. With the intention to have a mystical experience. And they had to be willing to have a mystical experience. They were divinity students after all. They were open to it. And so those numbers held out after Roland Griffiths did his basically much tighter experiment to determine the same thing.

Is it repeatable? Yes. Johns Hopkins, they did it again in 2006, and they got the same results. 65% of people in the right setting setting with the intention to have a mystical experience did. Can you imagine that? That in one shot, you can be one of 65 people with the right intention, the right setting setting, you can be one of 65% of people who actually sees God.

That's a lot of us. That's what happened to me in that room in 1971 before I met Alex, seeing this God. And I did just what Ram Dass said. So Ram Dass became a very important part of my life and changed my life. And being together all these years, we have become a friend to Ram Dass and an acquaintance and beloved to Ram Dass. He beloved greatly to us. We went to see him. He signed the back of the painting.

He gave us a few hours of his time. He's been there for us in a few occasions that I think were God planted. He was where I was on my way to, and Alex too, when my mother died. I was getting off the plane when I got a call from the social worker that my mother had died. And I was on my way to Ram Dass. They picked us up at the airport. They took us to Ram Dass' house and he was the first person I could talk to about it. I'm getting chills. And we cried and he was there for our daughter

and blessed her when she was four months old. So, I mean, Ram Dass is very beloved. I think, well, he's very beloved. He's very enlightened. He's been a holy figure for us. He wasn't for Maharaji, though. Exactly. So that was 1962.

Walter Pankey did this kind of breakthrough thing that was really so awesome. But, you know, they were doing a lot of experimentation and trying to figure out what this substance was. And they were trying to do, you know, uh, legit kind of experimentation. Leary did a number of, of wonderful experiments on prisoners and things like that. And, uh, tried to help people, uh, with recidivism and various kinds of things to break through to what do you want to do with your life and and why wouldn't you spend it you know uh in an inspired way you know instead

of trying to hurt people and stuff so so uh so leary always had good intentions i think uh but it got really hot and uh so harvard couldn Harvard couldn't really, uh, take all of the heat from, uh, you know, various parents and things that were, uh, talking to him. And so they, uh, they had to ask, uh, Tim and, uh, and Richard to leave. And so it was kind of like shocking really, uh, cause they were such imminent and brilliant uh psychologists uh they weren't sure what they'd do they knew they they basically had something really important that they you know needed to do to share this you know and it obviously was jumping the kind of uh it couldn't be contained in an academic or a medical kind of environment, you know,

didn't seem. And, uh, so, and Leary got that soon, this was going to be clamped down that this society was not quite ready. So what he better do was to let people know about it as fast as he could and to advise people to journey and to really to not trust their government, but to trust themselves and their own hearts and to look inside and to break the spell of the game show reality that he saw going on around him. And so that was what I think Tim meant by turn on, certainly tune in to the depths of yourself and drop out of the game show reality. Drop into what is real and what is going to help us all survive and help us all to thrive together. And so at any rate, they found themselves at Millbrook.

That's where they did their most substantial work, which is not far from here. Millbrook, the estate, became famous because for about five years, Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, and Tim Leary, and Ralph Metzner all lived there. And they wrote the book Psychedelic Experience, which was based on Tibetan Book of the Dead. And wrote numerous uh kind of articles and other books as well like the lsd and things like that so uh this was a a period where they were both regarded as scholars but they were also kind of maverick or renegade uh scholars rogue psychonauts. Yeah. Like we didn't have shaman as the context and the, the, uh, transcendental guru type archetype was just being born as well in the West. The Beatles were bringing in the,

these kinds of archetypes and things. So, so the West was getting hammered with all these, uh, sort of spiritual archetypes and medicines. And it led to the, you know, some of the greatest music and art breakthroughs that have ever happened, a real renaissance. And then within a short time, within a few years only, you know uh there was a clamp down and uh so uh the just as uh leary had predicted you know the uh the man was recognizing that actually this is causing a lot of freedom of thinking and uh for whatever reasons uh there was a lot of disinformation about lsd you know and uh and uh so they were demonizing it in a whole lot of ways and we're not uh and and this were was making the scientific community who was studying it and who had already for 10 to a dozen years had established that,

hey, this is helping to cure alcoholism. Hey, this is helping people to deal with their traumas. This is helping people in therapy. So already psychedelics had found a use in therapy, from psycholitic therapy to psychedelic therapy. And there was actually miraculous cures were taking place. And several people, famous people like Cary Grant and stuff like that, were coming out and saying how important, how revolutionary LSD and other psychedelic psychotherapies had been. And Life Magazine, which was the main and most beautiful magazine of America, really, was talking about LSD and

talking about, and not demonizing it, you know, but seriously looking at it, you know, as an issue and, and it fascinated me. I was a young, I don't know, 12 years old or something. So I, I've been following, uh, following it for a long time. Those guys, uh, got raided, you know, like from 67 through 68, uh, Millbrook was raided by what was it haldeman or ehrlichman or one of those uh jerks who was plumbers for nixon and uh so he was like the uh the sheriff around uh uh there and was always coming around and bothering tim it's one of the reasons why Nixon hated Tim Leary. He called him public enemy number one. Yeah.

Yeah. So at any rate, Nixon's kind of like hair up as whatever about Leary and the hippies who were doubting his war. You know? You have them in your last painting of Dr. Hoffman. Yeah. The St. Albert and the lsd revelation revolution it was a painting that alex did to honor dr hoffman's

100th birthday and we brought it over there to basel switzerland to the world psychedelic forum and uh he signed the back of it and that will be in the exhibit at entheon and uh he he signed the back of it, and that will be in the exhibit at Entheon. And he drew the molecule on the back, and he was 100. And then we went back for his 102nd birthday, and he lived through his 102nd birthday, but he died before his 103rd birthday. But he was studying longevity for the rest of his life. After he invented LSD, he still was a chemist working for Sandoz and he was studying longevity and he was the first microdoser. It was rumored,

I remember early, early on before it was actually, you know, came out, I guess as real, but basically rumored that he was taking a microdose every day for his life and you know and studying uh longevity and it it worked because he lived to 102 and he was healthy enough to be walking around on his 102nd birthday wearing a suit and just being uh awesome he believed in inversion and thought that cerebral um inversion uh cardio uh stimulation was really uh what could help keep the brain young and thought that cerebral cardio stimulation was really what could help keep the brain young as well. Do you do that? Yeah, I absolutely love it.

I get the moon boots. I've used the teeter, like a $300 table you get on, and then you just go inverted with that. Those are great, too. I got my mom to get one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're fantastic. Yeah, and the brain is bathed with more

blood flow i guess yeah it's supposed to be helpful to your longevity yeah well you know after uh after richard was there at uh at millbrook for those years uh tim uh and others had gone over to india and so you know uh they said richard you ought to go over to India. And so, you know, uh, they said, Richard, you ought to go over to India too, you know, and of course he was really interested in me finally met up with his guru, you know, after a really famous, uh, encounter, you know, and, uh, who really converted him to Ram Dass and, you know, became this opening for, uh, really, I think for the West to be turned on to the, uh, both the culture, you know, open up, like Hanuman and a lot of the various archetypes and things,

and the kirtan music. These kinds of ways of having the sacred arts influence our minds are some of the great gifts, know that Maharaji through Ram Dass has brought everybody and so I felt real lucky to spend time focused on these holy people you know and and considering the influence that they've had on us. Well, after I had this experience in 1971 before I knew you, but three years later, Alex had his first LSD trip in my apartment. I was giving a party, and Alex came. Was this after you guys had graduated?

It was that day, the last day of school. I was giving the last day of school party, because I'm always giving parties. I was the chairman of my prom. So I was doing the party at the end of school and Alex was coming and with our professor of

performance mixed media and you took LSD on my couch that I made. I made that couch for you. I had a seat just waiting for you right there. And a doll on one side. And then there was this seat waiting for Alex.

And he saw God in my apartment. And so when he called me the next day to ask me to meet with him, he was really one of the first people I had ever talked about seeing God, because it was very political times. You know, I was a very politicized person and I, you know, just couldn't even talk to my friends about it. And I had started meditating. So I had sort of separated off from my life because of seeing God and then met you. And it was like, find the others, you know, I found you.

And we just never left. We just kind of, that was the beginning of it all. It was like in 1975, May 30th. We call that, it was, May 30th was your trip. May 31st was our anniversary of knowing. Because there's the anniversary of wedding, which happened later. And then there's the anniversary of knowing, which's the anniversary of wedding which happened later and then there's the anniversary of knowing which is the moment when you know that you found the one

so that that is um that is the the story of that i mean you just go through whatever you go through in 44 years but uh that was definitely the beginning of our knowing and alex you talked about that on, I think, your first time on Rogan's, where you had spent a great deal of your time being depressed. I think one half of your head was shaved, and you were balls deep in the polarity of the material world. Oh, yeah.

No, I was totally embracing that as the subject of my artwork, which is, uh, and really at that time in the early seventies and as an art student, I, I guess it was in my early twenties, 20 and 21. Um, I, for a while examined performance art really as a, you know, the the the medium through which you could explore anything and uh because painting had become a kind of contentless wasteland of you know stuff that i enjoy today but basically minimalism you, and if you were wanting to make pictures that were meaningful, then your professors would laugh at you and things like that. So I think that I became interested in performance art because there were still, you know, people exploring subject matter there. And so that was a thing that I was curious about doing and also

the idea that the soul is something that is constantly coming up with new iconography you know every night we dream and so it seemed like i was having these these archetypal kind of uh images and they would come like really very strongly and so i would make sketches of them and stuff and eventually i would enact them you know somehow and uh i had a dream uh really that kicked off the polarity thing because and in the dream i looked into a trash can and i saw oh my god it's me but all like curled up like kind of like fetal like in it with my head down at the can and like inverted and looking up at me like seeing yourself looking at and that person in the trash can had half of their hair shaved and the other half was all and it was like we were just connected freak meaked me out. You know, woke right up.

But then every time I started looking in the mirror, I started seeing half my hair shaved. And so that, and eventually I did it, you know, for about half a year. And that was when Allison and I first knew each other. Oh, yeah. That was the first time I ever spoke to you.

Yeah. Because you were sitting sitting behind me in class and you had just been in class for about six weeks and you shaved half of your head. First time I ever laid eyes on you, you had really long hair and a rag tied around your head and you had this fantastic billboard portfolio. You had taken a year to be a billboard painter

and everybody was so impressed because you made it so professional looking. And it was before desktop publishing or anything. It was just a document of all the billboards that you had, the spectaculars and the things that you had done for Columbus Outdoor Advertising during that one year. It was my conceptual performance.

You invited people to the performance. I contextualized my job as capitalist realism. You know, like socialist realism as part of the rush. Anyway. Yeah. But anyway, so you, so you, that's when I first saw you, but I only spoke to you when you shaved half of your head off. I just turned around and I said to you, why did you do that?

That's what I said. Yeah. But he was peacocking. He got you interested. He got you interested. No, he started to tell me about the Ornstein material, the hemispheres of the brain. This stuff had just come out in like 1973,

and I had never heard about the rational, intuitive side of the brain. Now it's so known that you think it's always been around. But no, that was only a couple years before, maybe the year before, really, because it was 1974 that I said that. And so, like, you know, hemispheres of the brain, rational, really, because it was 1974 that I said that. And so, so like, you know, hemispheres of the brain, rational, intuitive polarities. It was like actual, there was a mind behind that. It wasn't just a cynical kind of, you know, rebellious act or

something that was like, he was really exploring and it was had something to do with his art. And I was very impressed with how inner it was. Although I was never thinking about you you were so crazy I wasn't thinking about dating you I was dating the professor actually but but how I did performances throughout the year that whenever I would see you know like he would put up a sign and it was like an idiot's room or I'm crawling in the ceiling or or something like this he would be doing these really amazing, like, like self-effacing kind of like really almost, you know, self debasing kind of things. I thought, I remember I called in the door of a video's room and I, you look so pathetic. And I just said, I love you.

And I said that through the door, you know, because it was just a little holy. First time she said she loved me. I know he was lying in a pool of excrement naked. How many of you can say that? That's love. I was just, you know, and I signed the guest book

outside the door. This was your performance. You left a book and I said, I love you. He still has that. But that was really way before I really fell in love with you. I had no idea that I'd ever be dating you because you were so nice. Yep. But hey, that's what made life fun all these years, 44 years of us. It's amazing. So let's talk about what got us from the psychedelic revolution and pushback to where we are now. You mentioned a couple of big names, Roland Griffiths, who completed the second study to verify 65% would happen again. We've seen more studies being done now probably since then, since before

shit became illegal, right? We've got studies on terminally ill cancer patients where 80% no longer fear death, like you're going to die no matter what, but will you live out the remaining days, however long that is, without fear of dying? And 80% have a positive shift to where they live out the remainder of their days in positivity. I mean, that's remarkable in and of itself. That's a newer study. You think of these studies that keep coming out now we see with smoking cessation and alcoholism and a lot of different tools. I mean, if you've done this, as we have, you understand that there are limitless possibilities here with what we can change. And you know mentioning alcoholism i think bill w who created alcoholics anonymous wanted to include that exactly in the 13th step but a was too big

at that point and they kind of separated themselves from them and then it became illegal but we're uh you know we're we're here today what do you think of the potential for this going forward? And who are the major players in the world like Roland Griffiths that are carrying the torch going forward from a science standpoint? Oh, there's really what's so wonderful is that all over the world, there are centers that are lighting up, I think, that are and are being funded by some of the people who have found that their consciousness exploration has you know been really important as we've mentioned and so uh if you look at imperial uh college over there in in london you'll see that i think a recently born psychedelic center is there and the uh of course um we have our old friend amanda fielding you know in the beckley

foundation uh number one you know really i think the man who's carried the banner the longest and the strongest has been Rick Doblin, you know, who's been our ally here as well. And we've tried to do what we can to support all the MAPS activities. But the MAPS has done extraordinary work, I think, in finding the right populations to serve to gain the most sympathetic and heartful embrace of psychedelic use and the reintegration of it as both a medical and a sacramental kind of ally of humanity. And I think that Rick's patience in dealing with the kind of resistance and an attempt to mainstream these really important kind of substances, especially at a time when we have a traumatized world and we have a time when we have to change our consciousness quickly and We have to upgrade ourselves. All of these things are things that from time immemorial, these sacraments have helped for many people.

Some people shouldn't do them, as we have said. They're not really for everyone. But for a great number of people, I think they could be very helpful and already have been. And the rising tide raises all ships. So even those around us, that's one of the lessons I got in ayahuasca was I don't have to bring every family member with me to do ayahuasca.

By me doing ayahuasca and walking the path, I'll be the light for them. And me changing and being the best version of myself is enough to help them grow and to be better and to be more of service as a father, as a husband, as a brother, as a son. And I think that's where we can... I hope you're open to sharing your spiritual life though with your beloved, even though they may not be willing yet. Oh, they hear it all. They hear it all.

Because the thing is, it's your spiritual life. Yeah. And I mean, it's great to share it with your beloved and your children too. Yeah, Bear definitely knows what's going on. He's a young man and is already quite in tune. He looks at us funny when we're microdosing. He knows.

He knows on some level. Why are there rainbows around your head he knows we've played music all day oh okay yeah yeah oh yeah that's so great well um then uh so today we have the ketamine therapy for depression. We have a lot of these. Phase three is underway for MDMA and perhaps psilocybin. And it's fast-tracked by the FDA, which is incredible. They know the potential and they're like, all right, we're giving you breakthrough status yeah you'll go get a front of the line pass ahead of everyone else and i want the vets to be served as soon as they can because these are people that are committing suicide at at rates that are uh so alarming you know it's as though there is a war inside of the country. And I say that Ayahuasca has, you know, made it past the Supreme Court

so that there are Ayahuasca churches in the United States. And so I think they're very closed private membership communities right now, but I do think that that is something that is going to be expanding as well. Although I think that ayahuasca is not as sustainable as, say, something like mushrooms. Mushrooms, you know, they grow plentifully, you know, everywhere you want to grow them. So with ayahuasca, I always worry about taking down all the wonderful vines.

Yeah, they take so long three years before you can harvest a vine and if you don't do that that vine will not keep growing and some communities want to do ayahuasca every week yeah every week my sister's community you know and people all over you know uh brazil and peru and and and ecuador and Guatemala, they have regular ceremonies. It's part of their spiritual life. They must be sustaining the forest by replanting. I assume they're all aware of that. Other substances like huachuma and things like that,

San Pedro and other things, things i think are being sought but i if you want to look at a world-class sustainable psychedelic then it'd probably be a psilocybin of some kind and that's where the best a lot of the best science has been done too uh so we already have we have a we have a substance now that has been proven to deliver 65% of the time under the correct circumstances, an experience for people which we recognize now to be at the foundation of all worldtext for the sacrament to be reintroduced to a religious setting in a way that, you know, sets it in alignment with its prior history as serving those, uh, not simply medical needs, but needs of the soul. That's something that Rick Doblin has done such a great job is that it's not just for people in pain who are suffering from PTSD or fill in the blank, but for

people who would consider themselves to be normal, healthy individuals that just want more out of life. And the fact that he's been including that along the way. For the betterment of well people. Yeah. That's what we say. Yeah. For the betterment of well people. Well people. We're all well people. We want to be better. I love that. Well, let's talk about what we've seen here because you guys are, we're at Cosm, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and you're building, I've gotten, been very fortunate to see, is it Entheon? Entheon is the temple of visionary art, or the sanctuary of visionary art that we're building at Cosm. Cosm stands for Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

And Entheon means a place to discover God within. And Theo, Theo is God. So like the nth degree. And so, yeah, so it's a three-story, 12,000 square foot exhibition of contemporary visionary art. And we're working on finishing the interior very, very soon.

And then we'll be opening with some mall tours and eventually open to the public. And we're waiting to get all of our, everything done that we need to do on the list to pass the muster with our town. You know, you have to get a certificate of occupancy before you can bring in the public. So we're not there yet.

And we're going to be a better organization when we get there. We're going to have paved everything. And we're going to have a beautiful lock-up door. And we have a fantastic, you know, environment with, you know, air exchange and humidity and air conditioning in every kind of way for the art to protect the art. And we're going to have beautiful originals in there.

And it'll be fun to have lots and lots of guests to come and experience visionary art and lots of events. I was going to say, you know, you and your whole tribe from Austin could come and take up the whole guest house and you could have your own little retreat. And when Entheon opens, you know, you have a little ritual in there with Alex and I could come and take up the whole guest house and you could have your own little retreat. And when Entheon opens, you know,

you have a little ritual in there with Alex and I or something like that. It's going to be a small and intimate environment. We will have a room that will hold over 200 people, the Great Hall. So that'll expand our ability to serve our community because we use rooms that, and remote rooms and a lot of that. But we'll have that wonderful stage

and projectors and sound and all that's going to be in there with lots of chairs. So we can have lots of our guests, you wonderful people who bring lots of people with you. And so, yeah, we're going to be a full-service art organization. We already are teaching classes. We taught our eight-day Visionary Painting Intensive, which is a portfolio-reviewed painting intensive.

We had 86 applications for 22 spots this year. We can only put 22 people painting together in the classroom in a civil manner. We had the best time ever. So we picked the best painters. And if you're a great painter out there, the application goes in in the winter, February. So just keep looking at Cosm.org if you want to be in our painting intensive next year. And then we're going to be teaching at Omega coming up next week. They still have a few spots. They're so big, you know, we could just go and go.

Anybody who sees this wants to come to Omega. We'll be doing it again in 2020. So once a summer, we teach a five-day and an eight-day intensive. And so people join us for that. And what are the ways that people can support you? Well, we thank the worldwide community who has already been completely awesome and been helping over the years, you know, since 2014 and our Kickstarter, our first Kickstarter,

and then we did a second Kickstarter. So over 5,000 people got involved through Kickstarter. And then hundreds of people over the years have been, you know, whatever small amounts they feel like contributing, it's helped to make this collective work of art, which you saw today. It's a museum environment that will uh house relics um some of which we uh discussed you know hoffman's glasses a hair from hair hoffman

uh we have the signed paintings themselves for uh the shgens, Albert Hoffman, Stan Groff, and Christina Groff. All the sacred mirrors, all of Alex's most beloved paintings will be on view, and I have a couple of galleries too, and lots of the visionary art tribe from all over the world will be there. And how can people help? I wanted to make a recommendation. Become a member of Cosmo if you really think that it's like something that you want to support,

you can become a member and you can buy a brick to pave the way to Entheon. So anybody who wants to write anything, like something that God told you, if you want to write it, you want to have it written on a brick, we're enrolling people in having a brick with your name, your information, your memorial, your sacred statement, like the DMT

elves told me to laugh more. You can be sure there'll be a brick that says laugh more. Anyway, put something. Then when you come, it'll be a brick that says laugh more so anyway put something and then when you come it'll be there and uh you will have supported and be a temple builder with us there's so many fun ways we have a uh sacred mirror uh that's like i don't know like 12 inches high and it's got like the three amigas like we were talking talking about, from the psychic energy system, spiritual energy system, universal mind lattice,

as a lenticular. And so this object, I think, you know, because it's a rare item, we don't have that many of them. We're selling like works of art and little memorials of Antheon and stuff, like the steeplehead and various things like that. Gifts, ultra objects. Soul birds and things like this. Everything we sell in the store goes to build Antheon.

You know, so if people want stuff, you know, look over posters, look over anything at Cosm.org. Because we're volunteers. We're living here. But all the money that goes from everything is going into building this, you know, sacred space. And our intention is to sustain past our existence that Alex and I, because it's a church. This is why people wonder, like, why do you want to be a church? Because you can pass it on to a community. And that's what you do. You get a board, you get people who love it. It belongs to the members. It belongs to the board. And you basically pass it along to a community from generation to generation if you can sustain it. So we're just playing that game. That was the game that we were given.

In our 1985 MDMA experience, they told us we should build a temple. We didn't really know at that moment that we would end up being a church. But it was so obvious, but we didn't know it. And we had to become a church because we do everything that churches do. And we wanted to get the benefits

that in this country churches get. why shouldn't we call it a religion and get the benefits that other churches get and get our spirituality in the way that we get it that feels right to our community when we find the others yeah well for us creativity becomes a spiritual practice and And if we use the creative arts as a way of a context, if arts your religion, then you're connected with all the world religions, because all the world religions had sacred art. And so this connection point of the creative imagination and expression of the sacred is something that unites all the different wisdom paths. And it's something that it continues. the unity of all the different wisdom paths and the continuity of our mystic connection with the ultimate mystery the divine reality that surrounds us and is within us and is the reason that we're here and at the service of this

beautiful uplifting force of beauty that comes through the arts. It's one of the places that people still look to, to find what is the soul doing? What's it really saying? It's this still, small voice of conscience deep inside of us that we get in ceremony or that we get in ceremony or that we get

in these other states these are the treasures of the soul that that the visionary artists are trying to excavate and bring forward and and to share as other people recognize them they or it's not it validates their own experiences it validates people who've had that experience and it also maybe lays a foundation for other people who haven't had that experience that when they enter those realms they may not seem as quite as uh you know quite as unfamiliar yeah yeah it's been so amazing being here thank you so much for having me guys thank you for you know, quite as unfamiliar. Yeah. It's been so amazing being here. Thank you so much for having me, guys.

Thank you for coming. We will for sure be back. Oh, my gosh. It has been an absolute pleasure. Bring family. Thank you. I have deep gratitude and love for you both. Thank you. I love you too.

Thanks for coming. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for tuning in the show. If you're as inspired as I was and want to purchase some really cool artwork or books, you can go over to Cosm.org. That's C-O-S-M.org. And a lot of these funds are going straight into building Entheon. The public is available. The public will have access to go there. They host full moon parties every month, and they have some big time events. They have celebrations for

Halloween, for New Year's, all sorts of cool stuff. And a lot of that fundraising goes back into the hands of the artists as well as into the production of their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. They're doing some really cool work and I absolutely love them. Also remember, hit up kingsboo.com, that's K-I-N-G-S-B-U.com,

and leave your email for me. You'll receive my exact supplement protocol that I'm on right now. And you'll also get a monthly newsletter. And the welcome letter includes the books that I'm reading, all the stuff that I've been into, including the Paul Stamets microdosing protocol that I'm about to embark on for at least 30 days straight. I'll be updating y'all on the podcast. And of course, in the newsletter monthly about what that experience is like. So to never miss a beat, make sure you enter in your email over at kingsboo.com and I promise you I'm not going to bombard you with bullshit.

So check it out today. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you in a few days.