The Joe Rogan Experience - #274 - Alex Grey

Episode Date: October 10, 2012

Joe sits down with Alex Grey.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! If there is a man that is on more dorm room walls than you, it might be Frank Frazetta. But it's only like if you count all time. You know, if you think about it like if far it's like the 70s and 80s those poster years yeah that frank frisetta put in some goddamn numbers you know

that guy that he had some amazing stuff but you sir are right up there and you are as far as like the psychedelic community goes you're the only guy that i've ever seen that i've looked at your work and i'm like wow that guy actually like captured some of that you you you've actually grabbed some of it and you've uh it's it's for someone who hasn't experienced a really intense psychedelic breakthrough sort of a moment they they i don't know if they would connect with your artwork the same way. It's beautiful. It's striking. It's amazing and unique.

But what's amazing to me about it is that when I see your stuff, it's like you really captured something somehow or another. The unrememberable, you remembered it enough, or you channeled it enough, or whatever. But you nail stuff, man. That one that you were just showing, the hologram? Oh, yeah. What is the title?

Because it's one of my faves. It's one of my favorites. It's the bardo being, and then the diamond being. Let's see the angles here. There's a diamond being. There's the barter being. That's so intense. And there's the jewel being.

Wow. So see how they kind of like... It's like you have a little trans-dimensional portal in a postcard. Wow, that's amazing. That's beautiful. That one right there, that one, that's DMT. Yeah, that's totally DMT. Anybody who has had the tryptamine experience recognizes it. And that's what's really fascinating because it's impossible to actually translate that trans-dimensional realm, that inter-dimensional infinitude.

And yet, as crude as it is, a painting that's an authentic transmission from that state will communicate to people. And it astonishes me that I meet brothers and sisters all over the world that say the same thing, that they've been there, they've seen that, they know where I'm painting from. a really weird, bizarre, random image was recognized to me to mean something or have some significant place, some significant part in my life, whether it's some friends I know, a place that I live. But it would be imagery. It was really weird. It is.

I looked at that imagery, whatever it was, this strange geometric pattern, and it represented to me very clearly like this aspect of my life but only in a dream form it's visual poetry and i remember so many times going i gotta wake up and i gotta write this down but i couldn't even write it down because the shape was constantly moving in my mind you know it had like i was like no but if I could just draw this image. Well, that's what you did. Exactly. You drew that. Yeah, it's kind of a compression of that.

That's for you, of course. Oh, thank you. Yeah, you nailed it, man. Whatever it is right there, boom. The one with the stripes, holy shit. The skulls and the stripes, that's insane, man. That's as close to what a real trip feels like as is possible. And for anybody who has ever had any sort of psychedelic experience,

that's the crazy thing about it at all, after all, rather, is that it is possible. It's hard to believe that it's possible. Well, Joe, I wanted to give to you the fourth book in America. the fourth book in America. You'll be the fourth... No, this is... You'll be the fourth person to have seen this book, which we just got an hour ago.

My wife and daughter and I saw it. It was delivered to her door, and we drove right over here. Wow. So this is to you. Brand new. It won't be out in the United States for another month and a half or something like that. Wow.

But it is net of being. Wow. This is awesome. Thank you very much. Wow. That's cool. Wow. This is incredible.

I can't wait to go through it. Yeah. I'm going to set it down. I've been a fan of your work for years, man. Thank you. I've got a big piece of yours hanging up in my isolation tank room. I have several of them. You have a disco ball in that isolation tank?

No, I think that's what it needs. Really take it over the edge. The Cosmic Christ, that's another one of my favorites. When did you start doing this kind of art? How long have you been doing this? Let's see. When I was 21, I had a kind of a crisis, I think. And I wasn't sure that I really wanted to live any longer because I was really depressed.

And, of course, I did not believe there was a spiritual reality at all. And even though my friends had tripped before me, I never did because I was so miserable. I just thought I'd go to hell and who needs infinite hell? And so anyway, at some point, I prayed to a God that I didn't really believe existed and that that if you do exist then i'd uh i need a sign or you know i'm through and and so within 24 hours i i'm saying goodbye to uh my professor uh at art school and it was the last day of school, like August 30th or something. No, no, no. It was like May 30th, May 30th.

And around the corner drives this VW. And it's this gal, Allison, who invites us to her graduate, you know, it's kind of like the end of school party, and her sister's in town. So this professor picks me up later that night, and we go to this party, and on the way, he says, I've got in this bottle some Kahlua and LSD. And I said, you know, basically, what the fuck?

And so I drank about half of it. And I got to the door, and the gal drinks the other half. And I sit on her couch for the entire journey, almost, and just sit there kind of weirdly inside myself on one of her sculptures, a couch with a soft figurine of a self-portrait. And so when I close my eyes inside, and I've never had a trip like this since but i was in the dark i could see i was in the dark but i was going toward the light because there was this curling kind of mother of pearl like conch shell thing and i was in like a tunnel with a light coming just from

around the side and uh and it was awesome because that was it. Of course, this was God. The light was God. And I knew that even if I was in the dark, I was going toward the light. And I saw that all the shades of gray connect both those opposites. And so I changed my name to Gray right then.

And so my art has always been kind of trying to integrate the spectrum of reality into a more holistic picture of the trans dimensional the visionary and the trans transcendental Because the transcendental art traditions, all the sacred arts of all the different world, visionary cultures. Because all religion comes from the mystical experience. And that's a visionary experience. And you see it through all the mosques

are beautifully ornamentally patterned from the same visionary mindscape that a DMT user would recognize. And the same thing goes for the great Christian masterpieces. And all through world religion, there are these waves that have crystallized into these visionary experiences of angels, of demons, of all kinds of worlds. And they're really, it's the thing that connects all the world religions is sacred art, you know? And so we started thinking like, wow, there needs to be a new kind of sacred art that integrates this visionary dimension where all cultures emanate from.

The true visionary cultures emanate from this. You see it in the Shipibos. You see it in the Huichole. You see it in so many of these patterns. Isn't it a fascinating thing that art is such an integral part of religion, but it's not really discussed that way? Religion is all about ideology for most people, but if you really stop and think about it,

the Christian artwork, the Hindu artwork. What do we care about? We listen to the music or watch the dance. You know, it's the way that people connect together. It's a fascinating aspect, though, a really underappreciated aspect, the aspect of religious art having influence. Because especially when you're stopping

and you're thinking about back when people had no other transmissions, there was no broadcast images, there was no video, there was no photographs. You literally had nothing or incredibly stunning religious art you know that's it you know there was nowhere else to go to see iconography it was probably the the most impactful thing a person could see back then absolutely because there'd be all this other art but the other art you know whether it's a painting of a

tree or whatever the fuck it is it it's not going to be Jesus. And someone who can paint an incredibly detailed Jesus. And if you stop and think about the time in which these people were doing this, this is an incredibly – like the access to information was almost nil. So this, to them, must have been hugely impactful. The actual – because you could see it. And it wasn't just a thought. It wasn't just you talking about, you could actually see this painting.

Their benchmarks in the evolution of human consciousness is what they are. So strange that it's not really talked about as being completely connected. Because it's the underground mycelium of visionary culture that unites everyone, and that's what the religion of the 21st century is, I think, is just your creativity, you know, and it's your way that you connect with God, however it is, and it's, it comes out. You can look at

the arts, you can see how the arts could unite all world religions. It's trans-dimensional. Or trans-denominational and trans-dimensional. Wow. You know? And that's what we're building at COSM. Even Scientology has lava exploding out of a mountain and a cross with like a crazy star thing in the middle of it. Yeah. You know, they have their own shit too. Do Mormons have religious artwork?

Well, they have temples and they're quite extraordinary. So the architecture is... And the stories themselves are works of art. No, they are. All religious... Yes. And the stories themselves are works of art. No, they are. The Joseph Smith story? Yes. All the stories of all the founders and mystics come from this visionary experience they have. I think Joseph Smith, though, has been pretty much proven that he was a con man.

Well, he claimed to have a mystical experience. Right. And that's what ignited the excitement, the religious fervor of people. He was also martyred, you know, and there are a lot of people who hated him. Obviously, he was martyred. Like the Bob got martyred, the Baha'i, the great Baha'i. I'm not familiar with that story. Oh, my God.

You know, it's not the Church of the Subgenius, Bob. It's the founder of the Baha'i religion. Where is that from? Unfortunately, Iran, I believe. So he was considered a heretic. It was the, I believe, later 19th century, when he received the understanding that there's a unity of all world religions, that we should consort with people of all religions, and that religion comes in waves of revelation. And he argued for the equality of women and men and the friendship of all races. And so the understanding of how

some of the religions had failed us, but not pointing out negatives, but just positing what could be as a higher vision of world religion. It's fascinating to me that even religions that are clearly made up, like where someone has sat out to try to create a religion, you can call it a cult or what have you, but there's ones that they've done that where even though you know that someone invented it, it still has a positive impact in those people. So it's almost like even creating a fake religion, if done the right way, imparts some sort of state of consciousness.

Really? Yeah. Well, I definitely think there's a problem with that. Yeah. Stuff based on falsehoods are not really religion to me. The real religion has to do with contact, direct contact with God. And that's, then it comes out through these stories

and the validity of any of the world religions is through the direct contact. But I know people that are Mormons that have benefited tremendously from being Mormon. I mean, I know some really nice, friendly people and a lot of that have benefited tremendously from being Mormon. I know some really nice, friendly people, and a lot of that is attributed to their faith, which brings them to these churches and these communities.

But that thing was created by a 14-year-old boy who said he found golden tablets that were the lost work of Jesus. That is something that was created by bullshit, but it seems to be helping those people. It might have been a dream. Just like when you see picture images that are spelling out something to you.

To him, as either a liar or a visionary, was given this alchemical symbol. It united the symbolism of alchemy, of Christianity, and of Native Americans. Now, this is a unique synthesis. This is what Joseph Smith did? Yeah. Well, iconographically, right? The chameleon, the tablets. You could go back to Hermes Trismegistus, the emerald tablets.

Or you could look at the tablets of the Jewish, you know, Moses tablets. You could look at, so there's the Rosetta Stone. All of these, written in stone is a very powerful symbol. And the chameleon that doesn't burn you know it's the it's an alchemical symbol so to us the the iconography the icon of written and tablet is almost like all sort of like profound ideas will come in that form or many will come in that form because it represents like almost in our dna it represents something of significance well those um those aligned with

this uh vision this higher vision granted an american this was like one of the earliest religions along with spiritualism born in America. Now there's a differentiation because you have your Middle Eastern, which is mostly everything, comes out of there, and you go a little to the side and to India. And it didn't happen over here to our knowledge. Of course, the native people were wise beyond anyone, but no one was listening to them. No one took them seriously because they were all heathens,

and so they were murdered. We moved to an awesome, awesome place upstate, Hudson Valley, the town of Wappinger. And the Wapper people 400 years ago peopled the east side of the river all the way down to Manhattan. There were loosely federated tribes. And you knew that, because you're from Jersey, the Hudson River used to be called the Mohicanitook before Henry Hudson.

Whoa. The Mohicanituk. That's way cooler. Oh, listen to what it means. Listen to what it means. That the great flow that goes both ways. Ooh. Because it's a tidal river.

It's a moon river. It is pulled back and forth all the way up to Wappinger. Why would they want to change that name? It's so beautiful. Because Henry Hudson put his big dick in history. Henry Hudson changed it himself? He got it changed? Well, he did establish the white folk in there.

And there were a few friendly exchanges between Hudson and the Wappinger. Some of the very first encounters with native people were the Wappinger with Hudson, and he reports on it. where his men had killed some, you know, just in fear. And they kind of were forgiving for one night, and I think they all got drunk. Wow. And then, like, a war ensued. Over 100 years, the entire tribe was, like, wiped out. Oh, my God.

And it was the genocide of people practically and they've fragmented uh this uh beautiful people it was over a hundred years oh man it was relentless and and so the last time we're driven out uh like the sciota trail, the Trail of Tears. And I heard, like, this Native American brother came to us after we acquired this land in Wappinger because he felt it was always holy to the Wappingers. And so, you know, we put a big cairn to honor the Wappinger spirit. And he talked about what happened to the Wappinger spirit. And he talked about what happened to the

Wappinger and how they were walked out, like, through Ohio. They had to march. You know, and as they were going through Ohio, they passed right down High Street from where I was born.

You were born on High Street? That's where I'm from. No, no, in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, that's where I'm from. Yeah. High Street from where I was born. You were born on High Street? That's where I'm from. No, no, in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, that's where I'm from. Yeah. High Street. And so I put a self-portrait, like as one of my crazy-ass art projects,

you know, really early on. I used to work for a billboard, the billboard place. And I said, please let me do this. It's a dead board anyway. You know, nobody cares. You know, it's on High Street. And it was a self-portrait, but with half my hair shaved. And so, but it was a huge billboard kind of thing,

but with his head, with very ambiguous, like, what is that? And so High Street was the Trail of Tears. And at that point, Evan said that a number of the Delaware Indians began to absorb the brothers and sisters of the Wappingers, so that they found a particular kind of haircut that was only for the warriors. In order to keep their bow out of the hair, it was cut in half. The side was shaved bald and the other half was long.

Here's the billboard, actually. I'm from Worthington. Holy crap. High Street in Worthington. Hey, neighbor, how you doing? I used to live in Clintonville. A lot of people are from Columbus. It's funny yeah yeah we run into so many people from ohio yeah maynard's from ohio i guess too yeah that's uh that's wild man so you didn't even know that when you did it hell no i i i had to move to wappinger to find that out that's crazy wow what a what a sad sad story and you know we uh we spent so little time

thinking about the the culture of the the people that lived here before us it's so fascinating the journey on foot we want to honor them and um you know just say what what remarkable and wonderful people that they were. Could you imagine, I mean, I'm sure you have imagined, because you live on this property, have you thought about what it must have been like to live there as them before the white man arrived? It must have been amazing, man.

It must have been like Avatar, except no flying dragons. You know what I mean? No tail sex. But a lot of it was like i mean they were literally living off the land and they knew how to do it and they were sustainable yeah and they had great reverence for the land they lived on i mean they were missing a lot of inventions that western man had but man i bet i bet they were pretty fucking happy for the most part there's a i was in dis yesterday, man.

There is a disturbing trend of people getting so fat that they have to be wheeled around. Did you see South Park last week? No. They did the whole thing about that, man. You will fucking go crazy. Dude, I will go crazy because it was weird. It was weird. There weren't injuries.

There weren't injured people. They were just, or if they were fucking injured, it was from wasn't there weren't injuries they weren't injured people they were just or if they were fucking injured it was from being fat these people were enormous and they were pushing them around these other there was a these little scooter things taking them everywhere i guess the the morbidly obese have not had a proper vehicle in the past perhaps it's a tap out vehicle they give up they just give up on life. Like, fuck it. I'm just going to scoot around. There's so many of them, man. I mean, it wasn't, it was, I don't remember seeing this when I was younger. I don't remember seeing these numbers of morbidly obese people on motor scooters

where they literally have stopped walking. Like, that's too painful or they're too big to walk. What has numbed people to the point where that is an acceptable behavior? Is it the kind of crap that fast food has gone to? Certainly part of it. What do you think? There's certainly an issue with the human body becoming addicted to unhealthy foods. Look, me, myself, I struggle with cheeseburgers and fries.

I love them. They're so delicious. But I know it's super unhealthy. But I try to limit it, and I put really healthy food in between that. Some people don't do that. They don't. And if you don't, you can get caught up in this addiction cycle with shit food. Yeah. I mean, if you're, if, you know, everybody who does that ought to read that old report, you know, that they did it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's certainly a good thing to read. But I mean, it's, it's just, it's, it is weird. The numbness is a good way to describe it. Because it's just, you just keep eating and you don't see it. You know, you don't freak out. You you know it's like somehow slowly but surely you just get to this insane point and well i mean i love walt disney he's to me he's an extraordinary artist and and look at the

amazing industry that's grown up around and the breakthroughs in in uh motion picture technology all kinds of things that nature films you know they they used to really deeply uh and uh ubi works uh they finally are acknowledging his uh you know authorship basically of mickey mouse and things like that so it's i i think that they're an awesome organization that has tried to grow in a beautiful way and is in a way kind of the most generous representation of the cherry on top of American culture or something. At the same time, you really wonder,

well, what does it actually mean? What is the religion of Disneyism teaching us? Is it something about a passive observation of reality and to kind of delight us with spectacles of our sort of delusional understanding of certain things? Or is it actually playing an important kind of moral role? And I think that for the most part, you know, it's been a very benign to very positive organization, I think. And as art, it's unparalleled. They do have some amazing cartoons.

Stop and think about it. Like The Sorcerer. What was that first one called? Oh, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The Sorcerer's Apprentice. What an amazing, amazing piece of work. Extraordinary. And if you really stop and think about the time in which that was released,

I mean, there was nothing like it before. It was so groundbreaking. It's hard for people to really understand. Was it 1930s? Is that when that was? Yeah. Look, the rides are amazing. My kids have an awesome time. I love Disneyland. I'm freaking out about humans.

First of all, the fact that Disneyland is so packed. It's crazy. It's so many human beings in one area. It's incredible. But you know what it's like it's like mecca for americans yeah i mean is there anything else more mecca like in america wall of america maybe but not really no disneyland is the spot maybe uh disney world and disneyland

yeah those two yeah maybe sea world but not even no, no, Disneyland is like really where it's at. Mecca. Yeah, it's incredible. And you know what was really kind of cool about it was there's so many people there. I mean, it is insane. I never saw one person raise their voice. I didn't see one person get angry at their kids. I didn't see, I mean, for as much as we like to talk about the negative aspects of humans,

and man, lately on this podcast, it's really been a bummer. We've been having a lot of people like reporters telling us about corruption and people running for Congress that are telling us about how fucked up these new bills that are being passed are. I mean, you just, over and over again, you keep hearing negative shit, and we're guilty of it, too. We were discussing it. But when you go to Disneyland,

you're like, all these people get along great. Like, look what's going on here. They promote a positive vision of possibility for all of us, and have always emphasized creativity and the imagination as something that is really important. It's amazing that they can get that many people to be friendly.

You never hear about a gang fight breaking out at Disneyland. That's what kind of makes me mad, though, with all those protesters, though, in Anaheim who are trying to march towards that. I kind of don't like that. I kind of am like, there's a lot of kids there. Just get away from that place? Yeah, I think they were trying to do that because that would get the maximum amount of attention

because no one was paying attention. I get it, but don't fuck with that, you know? Like, if I have my kids there and you start bringing that to my kids, fuck you, you know? Well, okay, you shouldn't say fuck you because all they're trying to do was call light to the fact that a kid was murdered by a cop. Yeah, but you know what I mean.

Don't bring it to hurt more. Why would you bring protests where people are dressed up in the military towards kids? Well, I don't think when they first started doing it, there was no one dressed up in the military. That happened when they arrived. So I think there's a little bit of confusion there on your part

there, buddy. Don't choose Anaheim. Yeah, okay, but some things are more important than rides man some people some things are more important than rides yeah getting people to pay attention kids are more important than everything oh protect kids right okay yeah but listen this i don't think this is hurting the kids i think there's only reason the only violence was being thrown at the protesters the the protesters as far I know, didn't, and weren't accused of doing anything violent. It was the police that were showing up with dogs

and shooting rubber bullets, like we saw with Amber Lyon when she was on the podcast. They shot rubber bullets at them. I know, but unfortunately, you know how there's going to be people, especially like homeless people, that are joining these kind of protests just to be like, fuck the police. I saw it at...

What's the shit? The thing where everyone sat outside... Occupy Wall Street? Yeah, Occupy LA. When I went there, I was like, there's a bunch of drunk crackheads. That's a little different though. This was a community. This particular instance in Anaheim was a community responding to a murder. It was violent.

There was violence in Anaheim. There shouldn't be violence anywhere near kids. That's what I'm saying. Okay. You know what I mean? I see what you're saying. But I think in this case, they weren't trying to do violence. They weren't violent.

The cops were violent towards them. That's the accusation. Right. As far as I understand it. What we saw with that Amber Lion type of show. I don't know why I just went off in this protest. I don't know why you did either. You thought about yourself being a little innocent boy

why because I was thinking about how awesome Disneyland was and I was like when Amber was on the last episode I remember thinking that it is amazing

but what I found fascinating about one of the things that made me smile when I was there was it really is amazing how well people can get along

if sort of if the right kind of vibes are generated and Disneyland is like the exact right kind of vibe the only kind of vibes are generated and disneyland is like the exact right kind of vibe the only thing that sucks is lines yeah and in lines everybody just kind of laughs and jokes around and kids play with each other and it's not that big a deal they manage lines very well kids some some kids complain and they say look we're gonna have a great time we get on the ride it's gonna be fun it's it's amazing how well people can get along in that sort of environment.

And people can say, well, that's unrealistic. Well, no, it's not unrealistic. It's life. What if we all tried to get along instead of think that stepping outside of a place like that, which, say it one way or the other, seems a little more sacred to people. And that may seem humorous in some ways. you know, say it one way or the other, seems a little more sacred to people. Yeah. And that may seem humorous in some ways, but it's because it's focused positive, it's family-oriented,

it's non-denominational, and can be enjoyed by anyone. Yeah. It's a positive place. It's anyone yeah it's a positive place it's fun it's a fun place but and it is is sacred in that respect it's for for children it's such an it's like a little religious experience almost it's fun i mean it's like you see they have so much fun you see fairies in places you see you get a taste of the visionary experience. That's what they're trying to create. It's a fully dynamic, pull you into a new way of seeing reality kind of reorienting experience.

Yes, that's right. You know, it's like, oh, well, we just want the temples to be like this because they're so exciting and they're so fun. And some are a little too threatening but some are you know it's depending on the age you know and so you learn and you can grow and you can go and visit these things and enjoy them with your children it's a wonderful thing winnie the pooh is very psychedelic have you been on the winnie the pooh ride no oh my goodness winnie the pooh is first of all it's fascinating because my daughter she's only four and winnie the pooh is, first of all, it's fascinating because my daughter, she's only four, and Winnie the Pooh is like, you get buckled down in this thing, and it's a slow-ass ride. So when it's over, she looks at me and she goes, why do we have seatbelts on?

She was like, this is ridiculous. Like a four-year-old is like, you don't need seatbelts for this. This is so stupid. Like, why did they make us sit down? But you go through it, and it's all Winnie tripping, okay? Because they do it in the guise of him falling asleep. So Winnie is sitting there. And then Winnie's ghost is doing flips over him and flips over him.

Then we enter into this next room, which is supposed to represent Winnie's dreams. And it's all neon tiggers knocking him over and honeys everywhere. And he's like like this dream's amazing and he's literally in heaven i mean he's in this wonderful psychedelic heaven yeah where this like tiger who's neon colored completely like the whole thing is white you know black lights it happened in dumbo and is this it brian yeah look when you when you go through it when winnie the pooh has his has his psychedelic trip like right when he goes through and he falls asleep it's so obviously like acid based yeah yeah or mushrooms or something oh there he goes look he starts tripping that's cool

and then when he comes out of this dream you know when he comes out of this dream, you know, when he comes out of this falling asleep experience, you see the next crazy room. I mean, look at this. Winnie the Pooh is tripping his brains off. This is a DMT trip. Look at this. Look at Pink Tigger. Neon Pink Tigger. Look at this motherfucker with giant orange heads and green arms and honeys floating everywhere.

What is more psychedelic than this? Look at this. What the fuck are they trying to say? This happens when you sleep? Does this happen to you when you sleep? I mean, look at this. If there is anything that's a psychedelic trip, it is goddamn Winnie the Pooh.

That should be the next thing. Kids taking mushrooms and getting on the Winnie the Pooh ride. I bet you would freak the fuck out. Just a pot cookie on this thing. It's amazing. That's great. Isn't that amazing? Wow.

I mean, that is clearly a psychedelic experience. So this is a walkthrough? No, you're strapped in. Yeah, that's why my daughter was trying to explain. Awesome. Wow. So it's a little bit like intestines or something. Like you're being digested in his imagination. Yes.

Yeah. And then he poops you out at the end. Yeah. He poops you out saying, nope, psych, we're normal. Yeah, yeah. No more trips. The human-animal fusion is an archetype that's tens of thousands of years old. What do you think that is?

What's the ayahuasca, human-animal, anthropomorphic being? Well, there they were, standing up like human beings, kind of. And your association with them was person-to-person in a way. But they represent the character of that creature, you know, in a more humanoid, anthropomorphic, talking kind of way. So that spirit, in a sense, can speak to you, like you could be in contact with other animal spirits, but they would communicate to you in a certain language that you could understand. to you in a certain language that you could understand.

And so always, I think, the shamans had been able to have relations with these spirit beings. And some of the earliest cave art, actually, of male figures are so-called sorcerers, like the Sorcerer of Trois Frères. like the sorcerer of Troy Fair, and it is a horned kind of deer-type being that is also a man. Clearly, it's got a penis. And so it's a fusion. Is there images of it online? Oh, yeah.

Brian, can you find that? The sorcerer of Troy, T-R-O-I-S The Sorcerer of Troy T-R-O-I-S and then new word. T-R-O-I-S. Frere. F-R-E-R-E-S. Did you get that? Don't guess

if you didn't get it. Of Troy Frere. What do you think that is? So you think that these are real beings that these people are coming in contact with through psychedelic experiences? It's possible, you know. Or it's a portrait of the sorcerer that is an integration of human and animal qualities. Now, this is an enhanced version of it. It looks very similar to that, but it's on the side of a cave.

And so they would go into the cave. The real one, Brian, that's what they did is they traced it. So you can see what it actually looks like. It's still amazing. Isn't it? you could see what it actually looks like. That's still amazing. Isn't it? How old is that? There you go. So the archetype.

Wow, that's the real one. Yeah. That's amazing. That is amazing. It tells you quite a few things. It tells you the shamanic X-ray vision that is an ancient kind of quality of vision that sometimes you appear to be able to see through to the lifeline or to the underlayment of the fabric of the body of the physical body to another kind of body but here it's mostly the fusion of the human and animal

archetype you can see he's got a Johnson down there. I love his eyes. Yeah, I know. Isn't he awesome? He's completely awesome. Oh, he does. Yeah, look at that. Yeah.

I got the business. I got the business. Swinging backwards. You like my tail? Yeah, he's like letting you know. Yeah, right. I know. But he's not hard, so he's not needy.

No, no, exactly. He's not needy. He's a god. In fact, I. I know. But he's not hard, so he's not needy. No. No, exactly. He's not needy. He's a god. What a weird penis. In fact, I can look behind. What a strange little penis. Quite a, yeah, very strange. I'm going to look at that.

What is that? Negative. Look at that sweet ditty. That's a weird little penis. It looks like a little mushroom. Maybe it's a little penis. Yeah, it does. Maybe it is.

It's a mushroom up his ass. Could be. Mushroom coming out of his ass. That's controlling his mind. Wow. So that is, I'm sorry, how old? Can you look at, check the date? I think it's at least 16,000.

16,000 years old. Yeah. You know, the most stable civilizations, I think, were from, the earliest work of art that I know of is this amazing picture, I'm sure you've seen it, of this goddess that made out of mammoth ivory. And it looks like Dolly Parton or something. It's an amazing, you know, buxom goddess. And it's so archetypal.

40,000 years ago. Okay. So they were still having these figurines like the Venus of Willendorf and things like that tens of thousands of years later. Now there isn't a civilization on Earth that was more stable than the goddess-worshipping

cultures. They were agricultural. They were stable, sustainable relationships with nature. Is it just that human beings get to a certain level of technological proficiency, and then they just start to fuck each other up really easily, and that's when things go awry? Well, I think that there was a remarkable breakthrough in human consciousness that led to a cerebral kind of fire of intelligence that led people to begin to write and to write in such a way that they could commune with the gods. The earliest books were all religious texts. You know, 6,000 years ago, you know, the Vedic hymns, the Rig Veda, and you know, that's got references to Soma, the most ancient of these psychedelic cultures. Better than Brahma, better than Indra.

Exactly, and connects us with the immortality and the infinite. No one knows, by the way, what Soma was, correct? Exactly. Now, a lot of different people have different conjectures. I have no idea. But it was clearly a kind of entheogenic sacrament that allowed people access to the realm of the divine. One of the things that McKenna said, Terrence McKenna said, that was so fascinating to me, and so when you really stop and think about the history of human culture and psychedelic usages,

how could something that was so powerful, where they talked about it with great reverence in their scripts, how could that have gone away? How could people have forgotten what that is? I mean, it's amazing. Well, we're very distractible. And we are not certain about the kind of game that we're in. Is it an ego game? Or does love win the day? Or does love win the day?

And can you find your own personal connection with the creative source? You know? And if your life is an opportunity for your soul to read the tea leaves of your reality and see whether it's in alignment with your heart's purpose you know uh i mean that's that's one of the other great reasons that in theogens or sacraments or meditation or yoga and meditation or any of many different ways of accessing the imaginal realms. I mean, making art is that to me. And so as a spiritual practice, thank you, as a spiritual practice, I think it has much in common with prayer. If your artwork is in service of love and truth and goodness and beauty, and that would birth

a new kind of sacred art, as well as the access, the now verifiable and repeatable access to the visionary dimensions provided by entheogens, which has happened in numerous cultures, including the Greek culture. We have the foundation of Eastern civilization in the Vedic hymns mentioning a psychedelic. Then we look at the Greek tradition and the Eleusinian mysteries, also a 1,200-year-old religion and civilization, really pretty long time, actually, for civilizations, and very profoundly important. And all the philosophers that we're familiar with, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, would have been initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries. And so these great thinkers that formed the foundation of Western civilization had all taken a psychedelic and enabled them to commune with the gods and with the ideals.

That's what Socrates' whole platonic forms, that he talks about the ideal realms that he describes, are him clearly in contact with a visionary reality. One of the most famous tales about Socrates is he's walking across a square like he did every day, and he stopped. In the middle of the square he just like started talking and arguing with this Damon he called it his Damon and this was his this visionary being that he communed with and had a day-long 24-hour exchange with in the middle of the public square. What? Yes. He was crazy.

He was high as fuck. He was crazy. He might have just come back from the El Eugenian Mysteries, my friend. Isn't it amazing that you would arrest him today? If someone did that in New York City? Yeah, they would. But they knew he was frickin' Socrates. Right, they already knew. Give him space.

Right. And, of course, well, you know how he wound up. You know, he was martyred. You know, they didn't want him around. You know, corruption of the youth. And so he had to drink this poison. Didn't he have sex with a bunch of young boys? Wasn't that also part of his thing? What was, you know, you could say, where's the verification?

Right. And where's the notion that that wasn't something that was mutual? And where's to say that some of the gay artists weren't the greatest in art history? Like Michelangelo, like Leonardo. Does their gayness suddenly make them bad? I don't care if they did fuck. No, it certainly doesn't. But, you know, it might be an interesting sidebar about history.

Well, that's what I was getting at. Like, what was different about life back then that was, like, a really common thing, that men would have sex with young boys? And even if it was a mutual thing, it comes into question is when, obviously, when you're talking about really young people, you can't really have a mutual sort of agreement. You know, if you look at the ideals that Socrates spoke of, you know, of truth and goodness and beauty,

and being in contact with the ideal realms where you commune with these, you know, angels. And you get communication from the highest. You don't go about messing like that. That happens at the kind of perversion of, you know, what the intention of God is, I believe. of God is, I believe. But in terms of reaching, you know, like, he was a just, he was interested in what was just. You know, he wasn't interested in molestation. Pete So you feel that those are just false charges against him, or do you think that history is just...

Pete I have no idea. How are you going to prove these things? How would you? What we like to do is trash all of our heroes to make them as low as possible so that you have no hope about human character. And I think that's shame. I did not look at it that way when I heard this and read this.

I kept hearing about this in many, many civilizations. I mean, obviously the Greeks were famous for it. The Romans were famous for it as well. And my point was merely that was sexuality viewed as a completely different thing than the way we view it today? Yeah, I think it's more that than a molestation thing. I think we're very repressed, whether we believe it or not. And I'm not saying

you should start having sex with young people but we're incredibly repressed when it comes to sexuality i suppose and i wonder if back then it was just the ideal was different that the literally the way you thought of life was different and it's i think it's very hard for people i think you're right yeah i think it's very hard for people. I think you're right. Yeah. I think it's very hard for people to wrap their heads around that, especially if it comes to something as controversial as sex with young people. Of course. Still, you have to be objective. Look at different.

If you're an anthropological kind of fan, and you really look at different world cultures, well, yes, you can see they've all got one head, two arms, two legs in general, and have two sexes, and come in a variety of colors and things. But there are many different cultural practices that work uniquely for each little niche of human civilization or culture. And it's astonishing, really. Yeah, it's really...

And it's different in different chronology... I'm sorry, in different times. You know, oh, we believed this then, and then now we don't do bloodletting so much anymore. You know? Well, I don't believe in it so much. How fascinated are you uh by the maya and uh mayan culture and there if there was ever a culture like so severely obviously impacted by

psychedelics yeah it's really true it's like the whole culture i i went to chichen itza and uh i had a uh really uh educated uh guide it was a guy who was a local professor who took us around. And he taught more openly than I've ever heard anybody talk because I didn't even ask him. He started talking about the psychedelic drug rituals that they would have and where they would have them, and he explained.

Was it chocolate and mushrooms? I don't know what it was. I believe it was teonanacatl, which was the flesh of the gods. And they mixed the chocolate and the mushrooms which is done to this day it's delicious the chocolate is so good for you too by the way i like mine yeah yeah you've never had people don't ever like raw cocoa raw chocolate especially so super high in antioxidants like you know like well psilocybin has also gotten the

I think the greatest endorsement from the scientific community. The Johns Hopkins study? Yes, of course. And Roland Griffiths and confirming basically the same discovery from the Good Friday experiment. Maybe you can talk some sense to my friend Brian

then because my friend Brian has done mushrooms a bunch of times and he doesn't see any transformative nature to the drug. He thinks he should just take it and go watch movies. I think the first time you take it, it definitely opens up something in your brain. It makes you look at things different

but that will always stay open but I don't think anytime I take mushrooms from now on, it might be something positive and I might gain something from it. But only like a week or two later, I'm back. You know, I'm not like thinking about that one trip I did two weeks ago and how much it's changed my life. I'm more like, all right, what's going on? You know, moving on.

You know, like it's never. You haven't you haven't properly integrated it then, my friend, because and actually dousing of one's consciousness into the infinite is well worth considering about how it relates to your everyday reality and what does it say. You know, what is the nature of consciousness? Who are you ultimately and what does God want of you? Basically. And I believe that your entire life is basically an expression of that.

You know, it's a natural thing. That's why we call, you know, art our religion or creativity in any form is this sacred thing. And Because it's an expression of ourself. This unique lens through which

the creative spirit passes. Not him. It's Wizard of Oz on mushrooms with Pink Floyd synced up. It's not like that. That's the cartoon level, man. That is like, I mean, if you have any interest in this,

don't trip again until you read Stan Groff's work. He's not reading shit. Well, you see, if you want to get the most out of an experience like that, a real opportunity to drop into infinite love where you and God become one. You know, you meet your own God self.

It is possible. But in Roland Griffith's study, it was those who actually were interested in contact with spiritual reality, who had an intention about it. Spiritually inclined people were the ones who were opened up 65% of the time. Now, each of them thought it was a positive experience. Not all of them got all the way to the mystical experience. But the mystical experience is something pretty well defined. And once a person actually has that experience, it's affirmative. It's so affirmative that you reorient your life to relate to it. And it may not change your outer appearance of your life, but it may empower it in some way with hope and, you know, new kind of creative dreams that, you know,

where's your creative flow coming from? It's not just cash flow. It's got to be, you know, connected with whatever you feel like your creative spirit is. I, you know, I have no problem with the word God, but a lot of people have trouble with that. But I think that it's a legitimate way of thinking of your relationship with a spiritual reality. Just to play devil's advocate, only so that we could answer the question, when you talk about these people that wanted to have this experience and then had the 65% of them, I mean, how much of what we're talking about is real? And when you go into it with good intentions to have some sort of a

visionary experience how much of it is your imagination how much of it is your imagination acting with a hallucinogenic drug to produce this euphoric state that you think is visionary contact or some sort of spiritual contact and how much of it could just be your imagination mixed with drugs and this is what you were looking for so your imagination created it for. And this is what you were looking for. So your imagination created it for you. And I'm not saying that that is bad or good because I don't, I have a feeling as I get older, this makes more and more sense, even though it's harder and harder to talk about. I have a feeling that things are neither real nor not real. I have a feeling that the way we try to define things

in such simple terms, I don't necessarily think that the imagination is not real. I think the imagination has some sort of weird impact. The mind and intention and the creativity has some sort of a weird impact on reality. Of course. That is the evolutionary edge of reality. The creative spirit is evolution in action.

Is that weirdly defined when you use the word God? Weirdly defined? Yeah. That's God's paintbrush, you know? Who created all this? Not you or me. You know, how much of all of the spectacle of reality did we really have a part in creating?

Right. But when you say it, when you're saying God, I completely agree with you that that is the most beautiful way to describe God, and probably the most, if there is some sort of an overwhelming power to this the creative force they're all they all describe uh the this sacred uh reality as a creative force and uh it at the first moment you know and it's the declaration let there be light let there be you know it's the it's the positive affirmation of the creation you know know, like, what is it? 13.7 billion years ago, there was an affirmation that took place. And we're the living result of it.

The evolutionary wave has brought us to this moment. And it's an awesome, awesome thing if you really look at it. You know, four billion years of evolution on Earth, practically, and from blue-green algae to human beings gibbering at each other on a radio podcast. Holy fuck. And we are to the future, just like amoebas are to us. Absolutely. No question about it.

Tiny. My question was when I said, does it weirdly define it, to use the word God? Because the word God, to a lot of people, does not mean that. To a lot of people, and probably most of the world, the word God means a deity who created the earth and did it with certain intentions and has rules that you have to follow or there will be repercussions.

It's a completely different kind of God than what you're describing. Well, if one would give themselves the pleasure of being introduced to the various faces of God, you know, to expand their minds beyond any dogma, don't really submit to the authority of any religious dogma until you've examined reality. And it has to jibe with science. You know, we have awesome tools now for actually analyzing reality. Pete Yeah, we can measure shit. Jared Yeah. So, don't leave that out or discount it or anything like that. And so, it has to have a sense of justice, all the rest of the things that religion has always had.

And that's why if we enacted our creative spirits in the service of love, and that's what happens at Disneyland. You see that there's a lot of love in families. To come what may, and they yell at each other, and they don't get along, and they're bitter and whatnot. But maybe for a few hours, they can suspend themselves and just delight in being together, having a visionary experience. It's a kind of a drop-down visionary experience that takes you outside of yourself. You get pulled in. You lose your ego for a moment and join

in a collective imaginal experience. And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, if you're playing the Joe Rogan experience drinking game and you drink every time someone says the word experience today, you're dead. You're not going to make it. Don't play this game. Shots. Stop it.

Don't play this game. My just point was that the word God has already, it's like to so many people. I absolutely agree that your definition. Our concept of God must evolve, okay? It can't be stuck in a fundamentalist definition just like our definition of religion. As Bob Jesse, my dear friend who counsels on spiritual practices, he said, Alex, you know, there's a primary religious experience, and then there's everything else, you know.

And so the primary religious experience was this contact with the divine, and that was at the heart, the mystic, every one of these world, we said Eastern and Western civilization started with psychedelic reality. Okay, then look through all the major world religions. They all started with this visionary experience. You know, Moses sees a burning bush. Would the guy next to him have seen it burning? I don't think so. It was his neurons that were burning. He was ignited with this voice of God and with this experience of this fire, not unlike Joseph Smith's fire, a fire which is a visionary fire.

Do you know that Jerusalem scholars have recently started attributing that to a psychedelic experience? Yes! Awesome! There's actually science behind it, apparently. The acacia tree is a very high content of DMT. And that bush, the acacia bush, it's very common in that area. The burning bush,

he talks to God, he finds out how men should live together. Holy shit, the DMT trip was the foundation of this uh jewish um completely messiah nothing nothing what was the manna growing out there man it's a good question was that the growing on the sacred calf that they were worshiping because like hey man we eat the stuff that grows out of their poop you know well? Well, yeah, I mean, no question that that was, not just that cows were worshipped because of that. They were, you know, they didn't eat them

because they were worshipping them, because they created these mushrooms that would let them communicate with God. Exactly. There can be no clearer, when you're talking about poor people in India, there can be no clearer example of an entheogen being a connection to God that then you literally don't kill these animals that you could use for food.

Yes. You literally starve. But you do milk them. Yes. And it's of interdependent kind of symbiotic positivity, you know, for each one. And there's a friendship that develops between the creature world and the human world. This sense of camaraderie with the creature world,

but in her case, the actual creature. In Disneyland, we don't experience these creatures all the time. We live in the cities. We forget about our connection with the creatures. And so a trip to Disneyland may remind you, even if in an anthropomized way. But they have really been working on that, too. They'll go down and open a zoo element and try to care for animals because they're part of the human story. The animals are branches on the evolutionary tree that we're in relationship with in this

mighty evolutionary patchwork that is the mycelium of consciousness on the earth that runs through everybody. It is pretty fascinating that we have, I mean, humans, for the most part, think of animals, you think of your dog, your cat, and then some shit that's in a cage somewhere that you can go stare at, or something that you can watch on a DVD. But it really is fascinating

when you stop and think about the vast majority of animals on this planet are not us. Like, this is not our planet. We are on this thing. We've just figured out how to build these really stunning structures that keep them out for the most part but even that like there's they've been spotting coyotes in manhattan lately they've had several coyote spottings in manhattan wonderful

there was a those are the shamans coyotes are yes they're cat eaters that's what they are yeah and rat eaters maybe and that's true too they're. And rat eaters, maybe. That's true, too. They're coming in for help. And it's interesting to see who thrives and who declines in the animal populations in these really difficult times, I'm afraid, we're going through. Mostly caused by humans. As far as the polluting of the earth? Yes, of course. As far as the polluting of the earth? Yes, of course, and the heating up of the atmosphere and the political suicide. I feel like it's the mighty mission of art to try and uplift humanity beyond its self-destruction.

This is why all creators need to really consider the ethical stand that they're taking in their culture and not just be like soldiers of fortune. If you're selling your soul that cheaply, if you're not taking people to some kind of creative source and positive force that is at the heart of their own creative spirit, if you're not trying to ignite and uplift people's souls, what are you doing? Why are you doing it?

What about people that would just try to be entertaining? Is that uplifting someone's soul? Maybe. It might be. Is it always at the expense of someone? Are we always making fun of people? Is that the highest that we can reach for in terms of our, I mean it doesn't hurt to disarm our kind of pompousness, you know, to try and knock down everybody. I think that there's positivity in that, you know, so that

we're, you know, less, you know, pompous. Some of my favorite humor is people getting shit on. Yeah, of course. So do I. And we love the drama. Like Kinnison. Oh, he's amazing. And my friend Joey Diaz would just yell at people for serving them ranch dressing.

It's very negative. But it's hilarious. It stirs things up. But it's fiction. It's like watching a movie with fake violence in it you know it's like watching people get killed by werewolves you know it doesn't really freak me out because there's no werewolves and it's not real i enjoy it it's fun it's just a silly created piece of art it's a ride you know and it is you know it's obviously at somebody's

expense that guy who fucked up and went in the basement that guy gets it you know yeah uh but it's i still enjoy it what does it feed in them what does it feed in comedy when what is it what does it feed in uh the human soul well it gives the human soul an escape for a short amount of time and gets them to think about how ridiculous something someone just said even if it's really negative how preposterous and ridiculous it is especially done in the form of stand-up comedy and uh for me i i just enjoy it as an art form i enjoy offensive comedy as an art form like i enjoy andrew dice clay i think he's hilarious i i treat him like i i treat a

band that i enjoy i like what they're doing i like what they're doing it's fun for me or you know it's a work of art. It's certainly not if I wanted to talk to him as a human being and that was what his point of view on life represented. No, he's saying a bunch of shit that is really silly and he's doing it in this character because he knows it's

funny. He knows what he's doing. He knows how to make you laugh. There's a big difference between that and it representing his life philosophy. Representing who the person it's art we need stand-up philosophers yeah we do and we don't we also just need comedy you know right there's plenty of philosophizing going on in this podcast yeah you know if i applied this amount of philosophy to my stand-up i'd fucking no no one would show up. People would go to sleep.

I hear you. After a while, they'd be like – to command someone's attention for an hour and ten minutes, you have to be funny. And you have to work on being funny. And it's like you can't have – there's a certain amount of philosophy that people will accept and a certain amount that if you're trying to get a point across, you have to throw in. You really have to explain people where you're coming from but the beautiful thing about the podcast is when i was younger i always thought like one day i would have like a message like as a comic you know like my comedy was so juvenile and ridiculous and a lot of it is about sex and stupid shit and i was like well someday i'll i'll evolve my comedy to the point where it's like,

it's got like a message because I admired certain comics that had that. But then as I got older and especially as I started doing the podcast, that became less and less interesting to me. Like, I don't want to hear your point of view through standup. It's just the same way. I don't want to hear a complex idea described through a song. I want you to tell me,

tell me what you're really thinking. And explain to me with all the words possible in the most descriptive and intricate and objective and subjective way possible. I want you to explain it to me with your own words. You do that just through stand-up. It's a limited medium. It's not what it's for. It's for cracking jokes. It's for making people laugh. And if it's at someone's expense, the way I feel what it's for. It's for cracking jokes. It's for making people laugh.

And if it's at someone's expense, the way I feel like, it's tough shit. You should be able to take the hit. Because if you're not looking at life... You should be laughing about this instead of feeling so serious about it. Not only that, I don't think it's good to enforce the idea that people should be so fucking sensitive when it comes to people communicating about them. I think there's far too many people

that get butt hurt too easy in this country, in this world, in this universe. I think we have to be able to make fun of things and you have to be able to laugh at your own self. And when you say, oh, is it someone else's expense? Sometimes they need that shit. Some people are ridiculous.

And some people look for every fucking opportunity to cry or be negative or whine about shit or do something stupid. And those people, I think culturally, it's important to knock them down. It's important. It's important to all laugh together. It's important for them because if they're doing ridiculous behavior and you highlight that ridiculous behavior, it benefits them. Because now they get a chance to see that, oh, everybody thinks I'm a fucking dummy. That's part of how we evolve consciousness.

Yeah, exactly. By becoming conscious of something that appears to be a wrongdoing to people. And if they can't accept that, all they're doing is dragging their heels behind the evolution train. That's what they're doing. They're kicking at the dirt, trying to slow down the train. They don't want to evolve themselves. So they don't want to have anything. Because if you're making fun of them unjustly, guess what?

It won't be funny. If there's no truth to your words. It won't spontaneously make people laugh because you've spoken a truth that no one will say. And it scares the crap out of people. You know, like when Bill Hicks would let loose on things you know it was like oh my god can he say that he said that you know and every time he would say something you know it was oh oh my god i didn't know i was going there and there and it was a genius you know of of uh carving territory but he also if even if he painted hell he painted a little bit of heaven too

and I love that about him yeah he really did he had some great points that weren't necessarily even funny but he wanted to make them when he was doing certain bits but he was so interesting that he carried it anyway you know he had this like thing he wrote down

the Bill Hicks rules for stand up or something like that I forget what it was but one of them was I'm paraphrasing it, that you didn't always have to be funny, just be interesting. Like sometimes you use the funny, you get the funny in there, and then you could tell them something that is entertaining for a brief moment, just not necessarily funny. It's a tricky thing to do in stand-up, especially not be preachy.

That's where shit gets weird. Like it's annoying for people. They in stand-up, especially not be preachy. That's where shit gets weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That gets annoying for people. They go see a comedian and they get really preachy. Yeah, I hear that. Because it's the intoxicant of the stage. You know, you're allowing people to have a massive amount of control over the influence that they have on you. To stand up on top with a big spotlight on you and an echoey voice and magnified voice.

All of that is ridiculous. So because you're in this situation, there comes a time where a lot of people do things just because they want people to think they're smart. They do things just because this is going to get a big impact. And then they start getting really preachy. And that's what it is. It becomes disingenuous. You lose this connection with the comic.

Well, I saw Lily Tomlin do something extraordinary. You know, like Signs of Intelligent Life on Earth or something like that. I heard that was very good. And even though it came out of love and self-reflection. And that kind of thing is really rare. It came out of love and self-reflection. And that kind of thing is really rare. And all I'm doing is saying all of culture is necessary. And the freedom of expression is guaranteed absolute, I think.

And it's the only way that the creative spirit can feel free enough to do anything and to explore and evolve into territory. But if you're going to then call it something like sacred art, or if you're going to try and reintroduce, because my wife and I had these mystical experiences, and what are you going to do then? Oh, I think I'm just going to make art about the marketplace, because that's the only thing that's going these days, you know, or maybe i should do some kind of vulgar uh uh transgressive thing to really uh make a spectacle and things or or maybe i should uh critique corporate uh you know vacuity or something like that no the mystical experience that's the most important thing and And throughout history, see, the reason that Bob Jesse said, don't give the fundamentalist the word religion, it's, you know, then, okay, you have to evolve it. You have to take it on and say, okay, there was a primary religious experience, that was the mystical experience, that was the visionary experience

that contacted, such as the Moses moment or these various kinds of things. Those things recur and they continue. And so there is contact with a sacred reality. And if we look at love, just people still believe in love, and they feel it from their kids and things. Now, that means love is a cosmic force. God or creator, whatever name you want to say, or just the Big Bang brought us. And if anybody looks at the amount of intelligence that it goes to create a cell, you know, Dr. Hoffman, Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, used to talk about, do you think it would be possible for the parts of a cathedral to be laid out on a football field and to assemble themselves into a cathedral.

Now, you think of the unlikelihood of that, even given the, you know, like, infinite time, and you know that it takes intelligence to build a cathedral. And he said a self-reproducing cell is much more difficult to construct than a cathedral. And he said, a self-reproducing cell is much more difficult to construct than a cathedral. And it is done in such a microscopic way that you have to, a good scientist would simply infer that the intelligence that constructed the universe is at work in so many systems that we see around us. And you would, even if you, part of your small mind is absorbed with the daily bullshit that comes floating by your screen, and you get upset about it and you get hooked into your

emotions and all that stuff. On the background reality, if you could just lean away from the bullshit and tap into the infinite that is always there, the divine creative spirit that really turns people on, that's the thing that people want to experience, the ecstasy of creation. And when you're even gardening or when you're cooking a new kind of soup or you're being creative, you're happier. You're not thinking about the thing that she said to you or the thing that he did've transcended the chatter of the mind, you know, briefly, and entered a creative flow that is an intuitive flow that is just a plane of consciousness higher than most of the current video screens that people are tapped into. So if you could just begin to lean away from that mental stuff and back into the creation that brought us here, then you'd see like, wow,

okay, things aren't really so fucked up, actually. You know, okay, so we blow it. so, we blow it. Look at the magnificence of this intelligent evolution to a point where we have, even though we don't know what reality is and this part of the imagination and consciousness, these are great mysteries. That's, you know, we are God speaking to God. We're consciousness speaking to consciousness, is the way that I see you. You're tapped into so many networks. You're part of a wider intelligence that encircles the globe and that listens avidly for your independent advocacy for points of view that are very marginalized in society. It's an extremely important stand to take as a cultural hero to many that you will acknowledge certain things

that are not popular, but you feel it's important to say. So your work comes from a place of the heart and a place of justice and a place of kind of righteous understanding of the multiple dimensions that we all dwell within. how I know myself and my tendencies to get in bad patterns in my own life and how I've overcome that and how I've sort of molded my mind and changed the way I thought about just reality, my interactions with human beings, all these things. I know that I'm not unique in my ability to do that. I know that a lot of people have done that, can do that, and are doing that. And one of the things that's been the most positive benefit of this podcast, for sure, is running into so many people that have said that listening to these conversations

and taking in these different points of view, these well-considered points of view, have actually benefited their lives, changed their lives. People are eating healthy food. Isn't that awesome? People are exercising. Yeah, changed their lives. People are eating healthy food. Isn't that awesome? People are exercising. Yeah, it's amazing. It's direct transformation. It's the, I guess, the fourth quadrant of how art and a podcast is a work of art. Yeah.

It's not only visually beautiful, but, you know, Brian's been weaving in the sound effects. It's a work of art. That's not art. Don't tell him that's art. Okay, okay. I don't want to inflate anyone, but I'm saying our will just be bing! Meow!

None of that. Don't encourage him. Oh, you son of a bitch. There it goes. He's got the shaman's rattle. That is the shaman's rattle, right? Is it shaman or shaman? I've used both at varying times.

Yeah. Shaman, shaman, shaman. Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's like Bahrain, right? Yeah. Bahrain. It's not cool. So this gentleman who you quoted about the word religion,

don't give it up to the fundamentalists. You feel the same way about the word God. It's like, don't give it to people that have a narrow definition of it. Keep expanding it. Use it even though there is a standard definition that a lot of people sort of think, oh, you're religious.

Are you a Christian, sir? Do you believe Jesus is your savior? And then things get strange. Well, that, you know, that... Yeah, the ideology can ensmall on us. It absolutely does. And so the real religion, the primary religious experience, is direct contact of self with God. Now, that is still valid and important.

important. And then the ability to let go and reach these strange realms of higher consciousness that are available with and without help from any sort of entheogen. Absolutely. Prayer and meditation alone as the royal road, you know. The mind is very variable. It's very variable in its frequencies. It's very variable in where you can take it. And my own experiments with, I shouldn't say experiments, part of my life is isolation tanks. It's a huge part of my development as a human. That's a fabulous kind of late 20th century addition to spiritual practices. And unfortunately overlooked. John Lilly really founded, and he was one of the psychedelic

fathers of this. I see... By the way, I should say something about Lilly that just came out today. They're showing on Twitter, it's going crazy, ketamine used to cure depression. Wow. They're saying it's one of the most effective uses

of cures for depression they've ever found. Wow. Really? Yeah. From repeated or simply one dose? Well, one dose has an impact. The same thing they were saying about psilocybin. But, you know, I don't know exactly what they're claiming it is. Well, you have vitamin K.

But Lily was a fabulous proponent of ketamine. Oh, my God. Well, you know, ketamine has an interesting kind of shadow side to you that I've seen it's very long yeah for people and I I never saw that in the classic hallucinogens that were psilocybin or even LSD or DMT they're not really addictive in the kind of strict sense. So ketamine is one of those interesting new substances. It was extensively studied in the 60s in the Vietnam War and used actually as a battlefield medicament.

And then small amounts of it, snorted or smoked and various things like that take people into these dimensional it's kind of like a catapult for your consciousness it goes flinging out if you're laying down into what seems like a very rapid motion of your consciousness, going very fast, even though you're laying down, over a texture, a kind of a vast texture. And we had these kind of openings into the void that were very profound and very heart-opening, in a way. It is a horrible club drug, it's it's it should be used very sparingly and it should be treated with great respect i but yeah i never heard uh

like i had a number of of friends i never got into it frankly you know i did uh we were injected with it i think a couple of times like back in the 70s. And it was an available thing, and a psychiatrist gave us that experience. And it was profound. My friend Todd McCormick, do you know Todd? Marijuana activist. Very interesting guy. He got injected by John Lilly himself with ketamine in Lilly's isolation tank.

Whoa. Yeah. And he went deep and he was kind of freaking out in the tank. So Lilly shoots ketamine into himself, gets in another tank and goes and visits him. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is high-tech shamanism.

Yes. That is high-tech shamanism that, you know, hey, I ventured into the coincidence control here that I'm not familiar with, and I'm really freaking out. And so, I mean, he might have even had to, you know, pay a little something to his buddies who run the machines to get his friend back. What happened?

What would you have to pay? Pay a piece of your consciousness? What do you have to give up? Oh, no, it was just like, hey, hey, I'll give you my sex. I'll give you my sex? Yeah. I'll change from male to female. Really?

John Lilly. He changed from male to female? I believe he did. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So you're saying that my friend Todd McCormick and his irresponsible use of ketamine forced John Lloyd to become a female. No, no, no. I think that's what you just said. I don't mean it.

I'm just fantasizing. Did he do that, though? Did he change sex? He did do that. I don't think it had anything to do with your friend at all. It was, for him, I'm sure, a creative evolutionary step. So ketamine essentially can be— the divine feminine and embrace it. That's interesting.

Well, a lot of people believe that that is the number one problem with the world. The repression of the divine feminine. Absolutely. The fact that testosterone exists in an intelligent life form that is evolving past the actual form that we recognize matter in into a nuclear. Absolutely. What else was he then? a prophet of transformation and the use of all technology available for accessing the human biocomputer and uh coincidence control right and so he really believed in a spiritual reality but it was a completely uh informed by arica and all the rest of the uh systems that he was familiar with but i think very legitimate and one of the most densely detailed descriptions from this trans-dimensional realm that we

currently have. And his incredible invention of the isolation tank was such a brilliant, brilliant invention. He was trying to figure out how to separate the mind from the sensory input of the body. And he couldn't get there with meditation, the sensory input of the body and he couldn't get there with meditation couldn't get there with yoga he couldn't couldn't quite get there he was always conscious of his body so he figured out how to do this in the first century defibration tank was like a scuba tank yeah where you had like a a helmet scuba helmet and you would float like from your neck they use that in altered states yeah you know to uh describe initially the

first they it was pretty chronological in that respect they started off with the vertical one that's right and then went to the horizontal one once they figured out how to use salt in it but his old ones he used to have like waste evacuation systems yeah well he would shit and piss in the tank for a long time you know the uh you know because he was interested in long-term immersion. Yeah. And this was basically a replication of something that had been done for many centuries. I'm sure you're familiar with it. You know, the Yangti practice and Tibetan Buddhism is all about the dark and, yes, all these things that he talks about that you're still dealing with gravity, blah, blah, blah.

But the intention is the same, to remove all distractions and to be surrounded by darkness. I wouldn't even call it distractions. And to be awake. And you lose consciousness of your body so much and are able to access your imagination. Now, Ibn Arabi thought that, and he was a Sufi mystic, my favorite. Your favorite Sufi mystic? Absolutely. Your favorites?

What's your top ten? Well, Rumi would be right next, of course. But Ibn Arabi was the most scholarly, and he called the imagination your angel. That is the place where God meets God. And so that is the visionary, mystical experience that runs through all world religions, and he details it, and there are celestial hierarchies that Plotinus describes in exactly the same way. They had a cross-cultural, although they were writing it at different times, it wasn't dissemination, it was all direct knowledge.

And so these were people that were getting it from the highest command and it came through their unique lens of their language and so they each had unique prayers to be in contact with this creative force. And he really did emphasize the sacredness of the Divine Feminine. Really? Yes. No, Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi.

And so the great mystics have quite often done the same thing. You know, I mean, what do we have more art of? Goddess sculptures. You know, the goddess is the symbol of beauty, the symbol of love for humanity. And although it gets perverted and things like that, if you step back and just look at the flow of art history, you know, back from the 40,000 years ago to today, what is celebrated? The beauty of the divine feminine and worshipped,

really. Really, truly New Age shamanism. The creation of this sensory deprivation tank is the the creation of something that allows you to take this practice of solitude and darkness to a completely new level and literally remove the body yeah remove the body from the equation and uh lily well you're still aware of the smell and you're still aware but it's much less not really because all factory senses only detect change as long as you don't fart in the tank you're still aware but it's much less not really because all factory senses only detect change as long as you don't fart in the tank you're not aware of the smell because you won't be aware of anything yeah your your nose will stop receiving any changes to see the one you've got

yeah it's uh it's well it's created by this guy uh crash from the float lab a float lab is in venice and it's the best place in the country he's a really mad scientist when it comes to it there's the filtration systems that he uses are the the highest standard and he's pushing for like an industry standard to try to get people to uh start uh taking these things seriously as far as like how you can clean the water to make sure that you could use them commercially yes people have thoughts about have you have you been to munich and to the float uh experience no i've never been to munich well maybe i have well i was in germany i forgot where i was actually sorry it was for a fight what happens is uh you go into this huge tank it's like a king-size bed but bigger of water okay and eight inches deep i guess and

so uh you lay down and it's the salt and it's really warm and nice. And it goes down to a very, you know, like ultramarine blue. It doesn't go totally black. And you can close your eyes and it doesn't change at all. And it's just the most pleasant and amazing relaxation kind of experience and he's woven it into the German businessman now the you know on lunch hour they'll come in and say wow man I really need to unwind and it's let's just like a half hour later they're like whoa it's just like they were meditating it does wonders for me

especially after I do jiu-jitsu classes and I'm exhausted and strained out. It lengthens your body. Your muscles, they contract and tighten up. And what I mean by lengthen is they relax and sort of extend. They relax and pull away. Everything feels like it sort of just takes a big, deep breath. Like all of your tissue, like, ah. It relieves so much tension.

And, by the way, it also benefits your body. It's one of the best sources of magnesium because the magnesium is entering your body through the epsom salts in your skin. It's actually very healthy for you. Very interesting. We know the filtration system that they had was unique and patented john willies no the one in the float in germany and they were they saw themselves as continuing to work you know john's uh obvious you know uh invention and uh uh move it forward

also in a similar way to your friend is doing out there in Venice. That sounds like a great idea, though, to have just a really light blue so you can even open your eyes and just the idea of doing it for as a short term relaxation thing. That would be very pleasant. It's extremely uplifting and probably the color has something to do with it. Yeah, people love blue. Like for professional pool, they found out that the color has something to do with it yeah people love blue yeah like uh for professional pool they found out that the color a light blue a light calming blue like a blue sky is like the best color for seeing objects around it as far as like uh seeing edges the edges of the ball and things like that the light blue is what really just appeals to the eye they used to

think it was green it was green for the longest time. But now they go with light blue. That feeling of floating also and the release of all the input that's coming in from the body allows you to take in information better. And what Crash has been working on over at the Float Lab is what he calls a cellular influence device and the idea behind it is it is a a screen that fits in front of your your your visual peripheral like from here to here and it is the lowest emission of light that's physically possible so you literally don't see

the edges of the the television at all you see nothing other than whatever is being broadcast they figured out how to tune that in. It took him years to figure this out. And he has these speakers that are in the water, literally on either side of your ear. They're all, it's all sealed up. And so they're underwater and you're in this thing.

And first of all, the sound moves the water. It pulsates the water. So you feel the sound, you feel it in your fucking toes. Yeah, you do whatever you want. I mean, what Crash is trying to do is get people to start coding documentaries

and instructionals to it because he thinks it'll speed up learning by a staggering amount. That's remarkable. It's an immediate kinesthetic kind of taking it on a cellular level, informing your cells all over. And also the retention is just far stronger and greater

because of the fact there's no distractions while it's going on. Same as, I mean, in theory, this all needs to be tested. But I can tell you that as far as just your sheer horsepower for concentration, to me there's never been anything like it in my life, other than psychedelic experiences, but I consider it a very psychedelic experience. It probably came to him in that state, and it was used to study that thing.

That's how the shamans say, you know, like the plants told us. It was like he was one of the first, really, scientists to do deep studies with lsd i find that fascinating and i find that so hard to believe uh i i don't i i also find it amazing how few scientists today openly discuss psychedelic experiences and are enthusiastic they'll be ostracized isn't that amazing it's sad well It's the same reason that more artists don't talk about it either. They're not mutually exclusive. People have to understand that silly behavior, yes,

can be attributed to recreational drugs or recreational drug use. A, one, that's not what we're talking about. And B, just because someone is involved in something that other people are using recreational doesn't mean there's not some massive benefit to it that can be discussed by scientists on you know a really scholarly level there's something going on that can truly benefit humanity by harnessing a substance that most certainly help people access their expanded states of awareness now that is what Dr. Hoffman wanted, and I quote him at length. On his 101st birthday, he wrote the most remarkable thing about the promise of the entheogenic sacraments

and about how he hoped, because he always felt tremendously guilty for anyone who had taken a wrong turn. It had catalyzed their predisposition to a psychotic state. Borderline personalities should avoid it entirely. People who have a history of mental illness, You know, without professional use, they should avoid these things for sure. But sometimes people take them. And so it haunted him horribly. And he was never an advocate,

but he, at the end of his life, really, you know, he kind of told people about it. He, on stage, would say that, you know, I synthesized it in 1938. We tested it on animals. Nothing happened. You know, and then five years later, you know, in April, he starts to hear a voice that asks him to re-synthesize this particular molecule. Now, he synthesizes thousands and thousands of molecules, but he said never before had he heard that voice calling him to do a particular thing, so he did it.

And then April 19th, when he finally basically dosed himself in 1943, at 420. uh yeah a 419 at 4 20 p.m p.m he uh in his journal he writes uh that was his uh that's when he took it and is that the origin of 420 no no it's not because that wouldn't make sense no it isn't but it's an interesting coincidence yeah and uh so i mean it it may have had some sequential elegance in his own uh journal writing it wasn't randomly that he chose that time to do it because it was an experiment that he was wondering about but he but he bre brewed up the tiniest amount that is for sure not active by any substance known to humanity.

If you take 250 millionths of a gram, nothing happens with anything. That's like, what do they call it, homeopathy. It's that kind of dosage. But little did he know that he had stumbled upon the most potent psychoactive substance of all times. You know, many times more potent and powerful than any other sacrament in those tiny amounts. And so he was catapulted into a kind of chaos that he thought he was dying, of course, you know, and he just didn't want to die in the lab. He wanted to just go home, you know, to die. And so he was freaking out, feeling for sure he had poisoned himself,

and he and his assistant rode their bicycles back. of course that's why they call it bicycle day you know 419 and that he made it home and then they called it was April 19 April 19 it was 1943 at 420 yes yes that there was a I I did a painting and it's in the net of being book need to bet the lottery we We need to call. We need to put some numbers down. Well, you know what happened that same day? What? Probably around the same time.

What? Well, there was a Warsaw Ghetto uprising that happened in the wake of the Nazis wanting to burn down the Warsaw Ghetto. And it never happened before. There was a spike in the novelty uh curve that day that uh was off the charts and uh they it it led to a siege it never happened it never happened since whoa what the fuck's up with that that number isn't that interesting isn't that interesting do you do does that make sense it's a synchronicity that's just interesting.

You know, something I've been noticing, and I can't explain it at all, but it's just one of those mystery things like you were saying, like in your dream you see these various things, you know, they're saying something. It's almost like God is a punster, you know, and putting visual rebuses for this is a visual language in front of us. Have you ever looked into all this stuff that's going on right now in physics where all these different scientists are proposing the idea that we're living inside of a simulation? And it's becoming more and more prominent today. I got a new thing, technologyre technology review.com a new thing published by mit and this was uh sent to me through twitter so of course i i had to investigate it because i

i'm inundated by this shit like literally every day there's like some new study or some new proposal about the the world being some sort of the universe the reality being some sort of the universe, the reality being some sort of a simulation. When you see shit like the number 420 coming up over and over again, 419 and 420, do you ever stop and go, well, maybe that's just the way it was written. It's the cosmic wink. It's the cosmic wink. There are so many correspondences, I feel,

like the, look at what happened to psychedelic culture. After that time, uh, you know, was, uh, there, there came a time of tremendous repression, but first, there was scientific study. So they actually established the true merits of these substances prior to them becoming illegal. Illegal for political reasons, by the way. You know. Hmm. Not for... And I think it's anti-American.

Because America is all about freedom of religion and freedom of point of view. And as Terence McKenna says, you know, there's nothing ever been adduced against them except that they give people funny ideas. Yeah. Well, your definition of America, much like your definition of God, is not the popular one, you know, as far as the rest of the world. I'd like to look... When they think of what America represents, they think of a giant military monster.

Exactly. It's AmeriCorps. That's what I call it's americorps that's what i call it americorps is that what america has become right it's a living death that's being perpetrated on the world and it's because of of this uh you know sell out you know of the soul to uh the military industrial complex eisenhower warned us about it i was just gonna say that yeah and so so you know, of the soul to the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned us about it. I was just going to say that, yeah. And so, you know, there are various reformers in government that are trying, you know, really trying to shift things, but they're massive forces.

You know, they're archons, as the Gnostics would say, you know, that are kind of dragging their heels in the evolutionary bell curve. They haven't gotten the message that we're all a unity and that we need to now think about how we can best preserve the life web, not how we can destroy it and make profits for a few years while we watch the weather go haywire. There's never before been a clear indication that the people who are in charge are not, they're not tuned into the internet. They came about this way. They created this way

long before there was an internet. And this is how it's always been done. And now that it's being exposed all around them, they're still clinging to this archaic notion of non-connection. Right. This archaic notion that all of your actions, all of your deeds, and all of our thoughts and feelings aren't all connected in some sort of a strange way, that we need to recognize, address, and we need to move forward with that as an ideal, that we are all connected. Yes.

Absolutely. That's not happening. We have to recover it. We have to recover it we have to recover it it's essential banks it's not happening with the federal reserve or whoever the fuck is in charge of sending us to afghanistan whoever wants us exactly put you know yeah well that was a that was an obvious and huge mistake there's even a a page in there called Remembering 9-11 Before It Happened. Now, I think that it's a pretty remarkable kind of thing that happened there. Of course, who but a spook would do something like that, 9-11? That's a joke, okay? Emergency, That's a joke.

Okay? Emergency. You know? That's a spook. That's a joke. What do you mean? Like the 9-11 is the code word for emergency. Right, right. Now, outside of America, question mark?

You know? Like, that's a reference that only an American would play with because, okay, so then we have all the explosive evidence about what happened that day. Now, you know, the everybody from paying attention to Enron and go into some place that never attacked us that's this is your point the Iraq war what was that based on but a lot of lies and Afghanistan the same way that there was a need to sell weaponry and to spend money on these mercenaries in order to satisfy a certain hunger. And this hunger is the shadow, is the set, setian energy that dwells in the desert and is uh and we are living off of what we need to

become is a solar powered uh humanity we are still struggling with set and horus who fought an epic battle thousands of years ago in the deserts of egypt continue it today, the soul of humanity has to go toward the light and find new energy means to bring us out of our dependence, our addictions to the destructive web of this kind of oil garky that we're enmeshed in. So it's your opinion that September 11th was some sort of a false flag event, and it wasn't just incompetence or an attack that was capitalized on by people with nefarious ideas, that it was instead planned?

Or you could say it's possible? Yeah, I entertain that possibility, and I think that the entire affair needs to be examined. But why I was setting that up, and the controversial elements that many scientists bring up, not, you know, like artists, you know. Like architects and engineers. Yes, all those people who analyze the actual material and the pulling of Building 7 as the smoking gun. But, you know, you can go down that and look at it I think it should be examined but the what I find fascinating about the entire thing is the nest of were exhibiting. On that day, there was a man who had a studio, an artist who had a studio in Tower One.

A number of artists had studios, actually, in the Twin Towers. And his name was Michael Richards, actually. He was a black artist, and he was a sculptor. And remarkable, wonderful work. Did he hate himself? Well, he was an awesome... That was a bad joke. Yeah. No, he has no relationship to that fellow, and just happened to have the same name.

And so his entire body of work was destroyed practically when the plane hit the Twin Towers. And so a couple months later, some of his friends discover in this museum in South Carolina that they have one of his pieces once been discovered and it was a self portrait and as Saint Sebastian

you know but instead of arrows going through the body they were airplanes wow okay of arrows going through the body, they were airplanes. Whoa. Okay. Whoa. Whoa. Saint Sebastian

and the Tar Baby is what it's called. Wow. Now that is a fact. Now, I did a painting like in 1989. It was a vision I had the day our daughter was born. And it became the painting Gaia.

Now, what's interesting, you can look in that book, Net of Being. We were in the World Trade Center, September 10th, 2001. Wow. And I put my tag in there, actually. And in the Gaia painting, there happened to be two airplanes. And there's also the Twin Towers. There's someone who looks strangely like George Bush.

He's embracing a terrorist and a diseased dick and I had no idea it was used in the Beastie Boys Ill Communication album which by the way has I can't stand it the most famous hit

from that album was Sabotage I tell you now y' that album was Sabotage. I tell you now, y'all, it was Sabotage. Right. And so there are numerous things planted into the collective consciousness, you could say. But then the comic book of Superman that came out September 12th, actually, had the Twin Towers surrounded in smoke, and helicopters were around.

The first panel, panel one, there was a hip-hop group. Everybody remembers this thing. It was released that week after 9-11. There was this hip-hop group, The Coup, who had two members there, and they were with kind of like plungers and in back of them the uh twin towers exploding now uh they were prevented from releasing it because it was september 12th they said oh whoa whoa no no no no no but september 11th uh in, where it's released live from New York, this particular place, this band

in Boston, and it had the Twin Towers surrounded in flame. So you think that these people who are creating this art, that are envisioning these images, that they're pulling this from some sort of... The collective. From the collective. I mean, Close Encounters, right? Remember that moment when they all go into the artist's room where they're, oh, this one drew it, and that one sculpted it, and that one...

You know, like they all got blazed with something. And it's such a fascinating nest of synchronicities that I believe it's unprecedented well you're you're your point of view on just reality itself has got to be so much different than the average person's how often do you bring up this I mean this is a very controversial and strange thing to say you know it's a very it's required not saying that my painting or various other things necessarily lead to the truth, but they point towards something strange, very strange. I mean, anybody examining the evidence, it wasn't premeditated. It's remembering 9-11 before it happened.

Right. it's remembering 9-11 before it happened right what I was saying was this is just the way you have to sort of lay this out how many times have you had this conversation with someone and you could see them go okay yeah

show the evidence though show Michael Richards sculpture which we do in this book, Man of Being. And show the folks at DC weren't fond of it, so I didn't reproduce their thing. But people can go onto the internet and find it. There's many DC comics.

They didn't want the Superman panel reproduced in a thing like that. But you can talk about it, and you can say exactly what happened and just pointing it out you have a sense of the uncanny there's a coup say uh and uh right they couldn't release that thing what that's the real image yeah that's it no that's not the real image that was what they fabricated and were to release that week but were prevented by every good sense you know to say good grief we cannot uh be doing i didn't mean is that the real image of 9-11 i mean is that the real image from their cd yeah yeah that was a cd cover that's incredible. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a smoking gun of some kind of revelatory breakthrough that was a terrible thing. It was a terrible thing, but it leaked through the consciousness of humanity. So you see the power of art as prophecy, and you see the power of art as what could it point us toward.

We want to see a sacred possibility. We want to look at our highest potential, not look at the destructive. We want to take that power of art and plant seeds of liberation in the minds of people, not this kind of negative world of self-destructive nihilist culture and behavior. world of self-destructive nihilist culture and behavior. My point of view or what I was trying to get at was when you go into this sort of a definition of things, it's a very fantastical and amazing sort of a concept that there is some sort of frequency that we're tuning into and we're getting warnings from from you know future events that will have a a big ripple in time how is this normally received when you talk to people i

mean you're a very unusual guy how many people can you talk to about this stuff i think it i think it's unsettling to most people because uh it's i i haven't heard it spoken of but I just happened to be one of the people that got blazed with a vision I had forgotten about it entirely I knew I had painted some oh this is the dark possibility of humanity and this is the light this is the nature

and this is what we have to and here's Al Gore with some basket of fruits and things what is the name of that? Gaia Gaia the Gaia painting and how. What is the name of that? Gaia. Can you pull that up? Gaia. Can you pull that up? The Gaia painting.

And how long did you do this before September? It was 1989. I had the vision in 1988, the day our daughter was born. You know how powerful a child being born is. It impacts you. We had been up for three days anyway. And I had to leave my wife they kind of kicked me out and i had to go do an illustration project but as i was going over the brooklyn bridge i had this vision you know and this it was probably the division you know of

manhattan and brooklyn or something you know but but i had this uh this dip titch kind of thing. There's a better one on alexgray.com. But that's basically it. The world tree as the great mother. And the stress that humanity is causing. Dude, the Twin Towers and the planes. That's fucking trippy. Yeah. So 1989.

And there was somebody who bought it. And of course it was in the Ill Communication album. And then I published it in 1990 in the Sacred Mirrors book, my first book that came out then. And so that was in there. And after 9-11, some people sent me emails and showed me the picture again. And I hadn't remembered any of that at all.

Wow. That's amazing. That's really, really freaky. When you think about these ideas and these blips and these signals and whatever it is that you tune into when you become creative, and these signals and whatever it is that you tune into when you become creative, when you think about the impact that the work that comes out of it has on people, what do you think ultimately we're doing here as humans?

Are we in a transformative process? Absolutely. You can't help but be transformative. Does technology and destruction have anything to do with that? Of course. It's accelerating the shadow. The need for change, too. The need for change. The need to grow.

It's almost like we're threatening suicide unless we do something about it. Yes, absolutely. Getting shit together, I'm going to blow my brains out. Yes. The waking up is happening a lot through the interconnectedness of the web of technology. Technology had to happen after an industrial period. All of it has been an evolving intelligence that is finally beginning to see its cosmic origins

in the story of the universe that we've been discovering and the Hubble telescope that shows us the vastness of space and the understanding of dark energy now that connects everything. The clusters of galaxies that had to exist. The Earth is a rare kind of, I think of it as this alchemical. Balancing act. alchemical... Balancing act. Well, it's...

You know the alembic that goes around the sort of whatever the alchemist puts into his retort or into his flask? This flask then is heated and it has a special temperature that brings the interior to transformation, and it goes through a lot of different stages. But I think of the Earth and its surrounding geomagnetic field. The geomagnetic field is our alembic. It's our alchemical alembic. field is our alembic. It's our alchemical alembic. Now you look at the Mars and it no longer has a magnetic field around it. And so everything has died. And so this magnetic field that surrounds the earth is our protection from the solar flares and the solar heat of the sun, and gives that beautiful kind of aurora that happens.

And so just at this particular orbit, where we in relationship with our guru, the sun, and we have this attraction, you know, but what is attraction? It's the bending of space-time, and you're at a particular circulation, but that circulation has the alembic of the geomagnetic field around it. Thus what the experiment of life can unfold takes billions and billions of years to grow an intelligence that can start to recognize its own source. That's astonishing. That's a great epic journey of the evolution of human consciousness,

and that's what's really going on. Don't read the times. Read the eternities, as Emerson said. It's a great quote. Did you ever see the Dream Theater album cover, live scenes from New York City? Yeah, there it is. There it is in flames.

Release 9-11. Yeah. It has the Twin Towers on fire on an Apple. That's crazy. Yeah. The future. How do you think this is all going to play out? I mean, obviously you believe that expressing yourself with love and using art and finding creativity

elevates the human experience, as do I. I think there's something incredible about seeing great art in any form, whether it's great music, great paintings, whatever it is. There's something about seeing someone really tap into whatever it is that is going on when you're being creative, whatever it is when you're really accessing the imagination, that elevates us. You see that as an integral part of this experience, of this transformative experience that human beings are going through,

but where do you see it going? What do you see? Awakening to our own creative spirit, our own unique lens into the infinite one that we all are and reflections of. Ultimately, humanity has a great future. If you look at the evolutionary bell curve of what's possible for human consciousness and love, And how primitive it still seems that humanity is in terms of their ability to love one another. You know, we've had great teachers from all over the world,

you know, teach us the same thing. The wisdom masters say repeatedly to love each other, you know, and not to kill each other. And it's something that is so simple and so true and so beautiful. And this is the affirmation of the intelligence that built ourselves. We have to tap into the, you know, we recently had the guest Paul Stamets visit Cosm a couple weeks ago at our for folks who don't know Cosm what you're referring to is the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York absolutely at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in Wappinger actually we had the great myco eco or eco myco mycologist eco mycologist paul stamets who's written extensively about

uh the power of fungus and the uh he's one of the world's experts in medicinal and um just the uh the power of these uh things to like he uses them to soak up oil spills. The oyster mushrooms and things like that have been used to draw hydrocarbons out of water that's been polluted with them. In Chernobyl, in the 30-mile radius around Chernobyl, there are funguses growing, mushrooms growing that are hot. There are funguses growing, mushrooms growing that are hot. They're radiation filled because the mycelium that they fruit from has been drawing all of the radiation from the soil in order for life to come back to the forest. They're the deepest, oldest plant on earth.

They're the deepest, oldest plant on earth. And human beings themselves diverged from the fungus over 650 million years ago. So we have this connection, this web of connectedness, and obviously a connection Terence sort of endorsing of the exogenous kind of fertilization of the earth with the spore, he believes it was homegrown. And he believes that we're exporting. So I love that kind of can-do earth-based consciousness that evolved in this alembic. For those who don't understand what you meant by that, what you meant for the story is that McKenna believes that it's possible that mushrooms came from the vacuum of space. Yes. They arrived here on asteroids. The theory of panspermia, which is we know amino acids and certain things are transferred,

and there are asteroids here from other planets that have landed meteorites. And that is also one of the theories about what happened to Mars as well, right? And that's how they lost their environment. It was an asteroidal impact. Possible. And certainly the human or the great chain of being and great chain of evolution that was impacted on the earth. Certainly there's a belief that the meteorite basically ended the era of the dinosaurs and these little rat-like things that were our ancestors were able to become more dominant as a species

and evolve due to the territorial kind of disputes being over with these large lizard people. Yeah, that really was a nice break for us. Really, and it had to happen. But we have big brother Jupiter out there watching our back and is taking the heat. He's the bouncer of the whole cosmos, or our little solar system. And so, only at a certain level, surrounded by a living kind of alembic, and shielded by a

particular kind of planetary brother, was life of this kind even possible? Think of how many billions of galaxies it might take. We might, well, we certainly are probably the only, you know, Earth planetary consciousness in the universe, obviously. You know, we're a unique little neighborhood. But when you say Earth planetary consciousness in the universe, what do you mean by that exactly? Well, there's no other Earth. Right.

We're it. We're the Earth. We're this planet, there's no other Earth. Right. We're it. We're the Earth. We're this planet. Yeah. We're the only ones. We're the only ones. It evolves uniquely. Darwin showed that.

On every little cove or things, things evolve a little bit differently. So wherever else life exists, if it does, and it quite likely does does most scientists would agree that but um is we have a unique jewel we've been gifted with it from billions of years of evolution don't fucking blow it that's the most important thing yeah it. What you're saying, if people don't understand it, is that Jupiter has a massive amount of gravity.

It's enormous, and it absorbs asteroidal impacts. It sucks them all up. It's like the bodyguard for the Earth. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's a truly unique situation as far as what we've studied in the cosmos, but there might be further evidence that this is a simulation.

Yeah, which is awesome. Well, you know, my experience with Allison, just to inform that one, our first kind of breakthrough psychedelic experience that changed both of our works, it happened about a year after we first met, like our first anniversary, June 3rd, say, 1976. And we both melted down into these kind of toroidal fountains

and drains of light. And every other being and thing in the universe was one of these balls of light it's like a soul but it was you know like a uh an amazing kind of torus it was like a toroidal flow and uh this thing felt much more alive and real than our kind of material world reality. It felt like this is what's really going on. It's eternally and infinitely light, and we are projecting our kind of souls into experiences to have enriching educational opportunities

and try to wake up. God sent us here to wake up to God, you know, to the core of our being, to our God self. That's why this painting that's on the cover of the net of being is called God self, because it's a symbol of our interconnectedness with all other God selves, as every other being and thing in the network has access to this great vast intelligence of the cosmos. There's no other reason that we could be here. When you believe that and think that and then see what's going on like with everybody saber rattling about going to war with Iran, how does that make you feel?

I feel very sad, you know, because really it's about break out the peace, monkeys. You know, don't destroy each other. And don't poison the web that sustains you. That is only logical. And by toxifying both the consciousness of humanity by, you know, entraining people's minds with limiting self-images instead of accessing our unity as a human species

and expand beyond that. If you can feel, even though you may hate your neighbor, you know, you may have a gripe here or there, but ultimately you connected with loved ones. Love brought us all here. Love is the highest expression of the cosmos. You know, Albert Hoffman said that the highest refinement of light in the universe is love. Because it took a solar battery like our sun to give birth to a planet Earth, and it took the evolutionary train billions of years to get here to a point where a consciousness, a brain, was capable of having the experience of love, which was the common source of everyone, the love that brought us all here, to recognize it in each other, to honor it in each other

through all different ways, and to celebrate that amazing experience. And to try and, you know, turn the ship around now, folks. Don't go over the edge. Don't commit suicide. Do something harder. Why is it more impossible, as the Occupy folks said, to imagine the end of capitalism? Why is it more easy to imagine the apocalypse than the end of capitalism?

You think that capitalism is the big problem and it's not just putting money above morals? It's part of it, yes. All of that, because it's not a God-centered consciousness. We've wandered away. Is it possible, though, to have a God-centered consciousness and produce all the shit that we produce, to make all the laptops we make, to make all the cars we make.

You know what Stephen Jobs was into, my friend. Yeah, yeah. He was into yelling at his employees. He was into making Chinese people work for $50 a month. He was into a lot of shit. But look at the nucleus of where those things that you were just celebrating came from. Well, he made a beautiful company.

It was from his LSD experiences. He credited that with being a tremendous opening for him and informing his breakthroughs in technology. And Cary Mollis, the Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist, has said exactly the same thing. And many people's lives have been ruined by these things. But many other people's lives have been saved. My own.

The Francis Crick story. Yeah. Is that true? There you go, yes. Is that true? Well, you know, it is a conjecture. Michio Kaku doubted me. It is a, it was released after his death.

Right. Because he, by threat of death, said such and so. Now you could say, oh, now somebody's just trying to hijack that breakthrough of the imagination. But then you go back to when it happened, and you realize that actually he was a psychedelic advocate. And he had, like many of his scientists friends experimented with these substances which were supposed to catalyze the creative imagination so he

had read the papers and he had access to these things and so he there was no stigma about it in fact the first life magazine stuff about psychedelics was extremely positive. If there was no stigma about it, then why didn't he come out and say it initially? Oh, because by the time that it breakthrough insight and the, you know, then what are you talking about? What? You know, based on a drug-induced hallucination?

Yeah. But, you know, I mean, that's how the benzene ring was discovered. It was in a dream, you know? And so great discoveries come through the visionary imagination isn't that how descartes got the idea of science in the first place there you go it was a dream that uh i think the the exact quote was that science and nature will be conquered by using measurement there you go well that was a really important thing. But conquered gives it... I don't think it was a word. Yeah.

I think I probably used the wrong word. But that is an aggressive stance that... Overcome. Understood. The male species has promoted because it's very self-serving. self-serving. And I think that if, you know, part of what we're doing at this point and as evolving human beings is trying to create a new model of possibility for humanity in a realm of sometimes, for some people, diminishing expectations. So the Paul Stamets point of view of how mushrooms can save the world and how mycelium is actually a network of intelligence that connects us with

the plant realm and that we can take advantage of by tapping into the nervous system that humanity diverged from over 650 million years ago. Now that's tapping into cosmic intelligence. Do you follow McKenna's stoned ape theory? Yeah. Do you feel like that's the way human beings were created? Yeah, a lot of people, and even responsible anthropologists, think that there's something to it. Because they certainly would have encountered the psilocybin mushrooms.

And who can say that it didn't play a part in catalyzing the growth of human consciousness. Now, it was Leary's, or I mean, Lilly, both Leary and Lilly's ideas was that these substances could advance in the evolution of human consciousness. Now, you look at the Unio de Vegetal, which is the first psychedelic church for white people, I guess, in the United States. And part of the mission of the UDV, which is a church that originated in Brazil, you know, the heart of the Amazon, from the green mantle of the earth, the green emerald, comes these great wisdom traditions that are spreading throughout the world with ayahuasca. And people are waking up to the mind of nature through these plant sacraments that have been used for centuries, for thousands of years, actually. And more and more anthropologists are saying, well, they were seeing visions in the place. We know that the bog people used to smoke cannabis, and cannabis has been humanity's friend

for a long time. Now, a neuroscientist, just to, and I'll hand the floor over, a neuroscientist quoted in Scientific American said most neuroscientists would agree that everything that we experience is a figment of our imagination. Most neuroscientists would agree this? That's what she said.

She might be crazy. She might be, but she had an entire issue of Scientific American Optical Illusions that it's a yearly publication. And so she argues for this idea of the plasticity of the mind. And when you take these dimensional shifts, like you're changing the radio station with your kind of dimensional shifting that some psychonauts are able to do,

you're tapping into different wavelengths. So you literally change reality. Absolutely. So you literally change reality. Absolutely. You literally can change reality. Reality is partially malleable. Well, reality is co-dimensional. Reality is co-dimensional. It's not like you, you know, this conversation changes reality in this dimension, but it

also has resonance with another dimension. So it's essentially what we were talking about earlier. It's neither real nor not real. Exactly. There you go. It's a combination of imagination and reality. One of the things that always struck me about imagination is how it's sort of marginalized. Like the idea of, oh, that Timmy, he's got a vivid imagination.

There's something to that. But the reality is that every physical thing, including this building that we're in, including this chair that you're sitting in, the microphone that you're talking through, all of it was created through the imagination. So it did not exist. It was thought up through the imagination. Then it manifested itself in a physical form. And we've become basically numb to the spectacle of the creation that has unfolded before us. And if we could remove our blinders and notice the awesomeness and lean away from the jibber-jabber, from the jibber-jabber, you know, we could be more at peace and maybe recognize that the same beautiful, true and good stuff that flows through your heart is flowing through mine.

Well, if it is possible, I believe that conversations like this are what move the consciousness of the people who listen to this and the people who consider these thoughts and the things that you've said. It does move things in a better direction. It moves it in a better direction for those people that are listening. And I think if there's any one way we really can change this world, it's to change the way people who are open-minded view it. If you're open and you introduce a positive new idea into someone's mind, that can change them and benefit them in a positive way. So if you really want to change the world, you already just did it. You just did it with this conversation.

You're awesome, Joe. I love you. You're awesome too, man. I love you too, man. Your work is amazing. And for folks who want to stay up on everything you're doing, they can follow you on Twitter. It's AlexGreyCosm, C-O-S-M, Gray, E-Y, not A-Y. And if they want to

what is your website? Well the most important thing that's going on is really the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors project we're creating

our first sacred structure our temple we're building it there and it is an incredibly

important time for us if you look at alexgray.com, well, let's see. Entheon is really the thing that we're working on now. And that is this new sanctuary for visionary art. And it is multi-denominational or trans-denominational acknowledgement of the power of the creative spirit,

and it's occurring in architecture now. And it's a place to house this thing. It's something Allison and I were shown in a dream. And she is the co-founder of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. She inspired the Sacred Mirrors series. She named the Sacred Mirrors. She inspired the Sacred Mirrors series. She named the Sacred Mirrors. So the honoring of the divine feminine is really at the center of my life. And she turned my life around with her love. And so that kind of love is, and the creative evolutionary spirit that goes through everybody is kind of what we celebrate at Cosm.

And so people do a lot of creative, you know, there's art church. We just had an awesome art church with other visionary artists. It's happening around the world. Visionary artists are like providing cultural alternatives, you know, where like-minded people, we call them the love tribe because you find them all over the world, you know, where like-minded people, we call them the love tribe, because you find them all over the world, you know, who've awakened to something beyond, you know, the stressful, politically charged national boundaries, and they're global citizens. They are tapped into the world-centric intelligence that could help lead us to a planetary civilization. And they, by the way,

probably didn't exist 50 years ago. Yeah. So that's the big jump. That's one of the things when people want to talk about how bad everything is, they're not aware of how good it is, too. So Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, is it Chapel... What is the website? Cosm.org. And AlexGray.com

has just been revised by our dear friends Fong and Scotty. Beautiful. And so there will be updates about Entheon, and it's an incredibly important step for our community and for visionary art, we hope. Listen, man, you just rocked a lot of people's worlds today. You threw a monkey wrench into the gears of reality for a lot of folks. I think that was awesome. Thank you very much for doing this.

Anytime you want to do it again, I would love to. It was just too much fun. Thank you, brother. Thanks to audible.com for sponsoring this podcast. And, again, if you go Audible.com forward slash Joe, you can try Audible for free for 30 days and get a free audio book. And as Brian has said and I've said, the Steve Martin one on doing stand-up. What is it called?

Born Standing Up. It's fucking amazing, man. It's read by Steve Martin. If I wanted to just introduce you to something that would get you to really appreciate the impact of audiobooks, that's my personal idea. That's Brian's as well. It's a great choice.

Give it a shot, but there's a million books on there. I don't know how many there are, but there's an incredible amount of interesting books on CD or on audio, rather, in MP3 form that you can listen to pretty much anywhere. And it just makes commutes and it makes otherwise meaningless time. It makes it educational and inspirational. And it's an awesome website, audible.com forward slash Joe. Go there, get your free 30 days of audio books, son of a bitch all right we're also brought to

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I can't find the blenders online, so I guess they're not there yet. But just to let you know, the blenders are on their way, you dirty bitches. And kettlebells are there. We have an awesome supply of kettlebells in various weights and sizes. We also have packages, and we have the battle ropes in as well, which there's videos explaining how to use them and what to do with them. It's an awesome way to work out your entire body. If you use the code name Rogan, you will save 10% off any and all the supplements.

You can't use that with kettlebells and battle ropes, though, because shit's expensive to send through the mail, yo. We're sending you giant chunks of the earth, giant metal with handles, but it's manly as fuck and really good for your body. So go check it out. DeathSquad.tv, you're out of shirts, right?

Nope, all in stock. Oh, bitches, they're back. So any of the psychotic kitty cat shirts that Brian has produced, they're back! So, any of the psychotic kitty cat shirts that Brian has produced, they are original Brian Redband works of art as well, by the way, ladies and gentlemen. You can get them at deskwad.tv and all also be informed as to

when tickets are available for shows that Brian may be doing with other folks that are involved in what is called the Desk Squad, including the End of the World show with Honey Honey, Joey Diaz, Doug Stanhope, and myself at the Wiltern, December 21st, 2012. The tickets are available right now.

No, there's not going to be any End of the World, folks. Okay? Everything's going to be beautiful. And if you go to twitter.com forward slash Joe Rogan and search through my timeline, you can see that there's pre-sale for today and tomorrow and the password is tickets. All right, you freaks.

That's it for this week because I got to go to Brazil and I won't be back until next week. But next week we got five podcasts and it's going to be fucking awesome. So we'll see you then. Thank you, Alex Gray. Thank you, Joe Rogan.

It's beautiful.