May 21, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:30:53
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hey you freaks. | ||
| What's going on party people? | ||
| We're back. | ||
| I've been busy squatching, so I haven't had time to be podcasting. | ||
| I'm out there searching for Bigfoot. | ||
| What are you doing, Brian? | ||
| You're not answering the Bigfoot question just sitting here doing podcasts. | ||
|
unidentified
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I've already made up my mind. | |
| Come out there for the people, son. | ||
| Come out there steady-squatching. | ||
| This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. | ||
| Squarespace is one of our newest and Favorite sponsors. | ||
| I don't really have any favorites, but I really enjoy this one. | ||
| I really like it. | ||
| I like everything about it. | ||
| What it is is a website that allows you to very easily create your own website. | ||
| There's templates that you can use. | ||
| There's various images that you can upload. | ||
| And you can make a really cool-looking website, including setting up a store. | ||
| You can set up an online store super easy. | ||
| It's ridiculous how easy it is. | ||
| And it's cool and it's fun. | ||
| You can also try it out. | ||
| You can go there and set up a website and not even have to use your credit card. | ||
| You just try it out. | ||
| Hold on, let me just pull this up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it's cool because you just have all these designs. | |
| You could put together a website almost within five minutes. | ||
| Well, you have. | ||
| I couldn't. | ||
| It would take me a lot longer than it would take you. | ||
| But Brian can whip through one of those fucking things. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| I love the fact that someone figured that out. | ||
| Because it used to be so daunting. | ||
| The idea of creating a website was terrifying. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| This makes it super easy. | ||
| It's really intuitive. | ||
| And it works on everything. | ||
| It works on a cell phone. | ||
| It works on your iPad. | ||
| It works on an Android tablet. | ||
| It works on every phone. | ||
| It works on every browser. | ||
| They've got it down. | ||
| It didn't used to be down. | ||
| It used to be really difficult to get a website, but now almost anybody can do their own. | ||
| If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you can try it out. | ||
| No credit card necessary. | ||
| But if you decide to purchase it, use the offer code, excuse me, use the offer code JOE5, just J-O-E and the number 5, all one word, and then you will save 10% off first purchase new accounts, including monthly and annual plans. | ||
| So that's squarespace.com forward slash Joe, and the offer code is Joe and the number 3, excuse me, 5, Joe and the number 5. Don't use Joe the number three. | ||
| You'll confuse the fuck out of people. | ||
| They'll think, man, someone's just really stuck on those old March podcasts. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Ting. | ||
| If you have heard of Ting before, if you've heard of us talk about it on a podcast, one of the things that makes me so happy is when I run into people and they tell me that something that we're advertising on the podcast is exactly as promised. | ||
| And that's one thing that I keep hearing about Ting. | ||
| It's a really good cell phone service. | ||
| It uses a Sprint backbone, but it's set up to be a lot cheaper than most cell phone plans, and it's set up in a really cool, ethical way, including if you... | ||
| If you don't use the minutes that you signed up for, they knock you down to the next level and credit you at your next bill. | ||
| They literally give you credit for unused service. | ||
| I mean, nobody does that. | ||
| Usually if you don't use your service, they're like, tough shit, that's what you offered. | ||
| That's what you bought. | ||
| That was your contract. | ||
| Your contract was 100 minutes a month or whatever the hell it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dude, I love fucking Ting. | |
| They're great! | ||
|
unidentified
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It's great. | |
| And when we were in Vancouver for 24 hours, I used both of my cell phones, one from AT&T and one from Ting. | ||
| And I just got the bill to find out how much my overages were for, you know, using international air. | ||
| AT&T, because I was on a shitty day to plan and I was being stupid, it was $270 or something like that. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, for one hour, for one day. | |
| That's so ridiculous. | ||
| My Ting, which I used a lot actually because I had better service there, $17. | ||
| Wow, that's insane. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| First of all, the tin can make it that cheap, but it's also insane that AT&T could send you a bill that high. | ||
| It's so weird that you go over to Canada and all of a sudden the same rules don't apply. | ||
| It's only like three hours away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It takes us five to get to New York. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| I'm so tired of countries. | ||
| And it's really fucking stupid of just AT&T even doing that because they know there's people like me that wouldn't... | ||
| Because what they want you to do is they want you to call them, get on an international calling plan or data plan, choose which one you want, and then it would probably be cheaper. | ||
| But what they're doing is like, hey, you didn't call us, so we're just going to fuck you. | ||
| You know, I mean, where Ting's just like, hey, man. | ||
| Strong words. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whatever. | |
| Strong words. | ||
| Maybe AT&T's just misunderstood. | ||
| They also don't charge you for teethering either, which is another thing. | ||
| I think it's called tethering. | ||
|
unidentified
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Tethering. | |
| Teetherist, teether. | ||
| That's one of those that you don't really say that much, but you see written down a lot. | ||
| Yeah, it's like something else like some people say rolfing when it's like... | ||
| Oh, rolfing? | ||
| The massage thing? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| When you're rolling on the floor laughing. | ||
| Oh, RO. Yeah, rolling the floor laughing my ass off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Some people say that. | |
| It's like, what? | ||
| I've never heard that. | ||
| But people just spell it out. | ||
| Yeah, those people need help. | ||
| But yeah, they don't charge you for tethering, which you shouldn't have to pay for anyways. | ||
| You have to have a software button that turns on and off, that's why you have to pay for it. | ||
| Yeah, you're still using the same amount of data. | ||
| What do you care if I use it off my phone or my laptop? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I have the phone. | ||
| This is my phone, so it's not wearing out the phone. | ||
| There's no reason. | ||
| But with Tang, they give it to you for free, which is how it should be. | ||
|
unidentified
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You also get free voicemail and stuff. | |
| It comes with free stuff. | ||
| It's an ethical company. | ||
| It's a fair company. | ||
| And they have great phones. | ||
| They have the coolest Android phones including the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Which is that big giant thing. | ||
| That's the one that you can, I mean, you really read websites on it, take pictures with it, you can watch movies on it, and looking at your photos on it is a completely different experience than a smaller phone. | ||
| You know, the people that try it, it's a pain in the ass for people to get used to, but once they try it and they get used to that giant screen, you don't ever want to go back to a little tiny baby screen. | ||
| This is what I want right here. | ||
| Oh, they have the Galaxy S4 now? | ||
|
unidentified
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I want it. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing the technology that's available today, but The point is you don't have to lose technology to use the Ting service. | ||
| It's cheap. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| And if you go to rogan.ting.com, you'll save $25 off of either one of your new cell phones or the service. | ||
| So go and check it out, you freaks. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Onnit.com. | ||
| If you have never been to Onnit.com, the best way to describe it is it's a human performance website. | ||
| And damn am I tired of doing commercials about this. | ||
| It's impossible to think of new things to say about Onnit. | ||
| If you've never heard of it before though, it's a company that we sell like kettlebells and battle ropes and vitamins and it's all like stuff that is designed to help human performance. | ||
| Whether it's your endurance with Shroom Tech Sport or whether it's physical strength with things like battle ropes or maces. | ||
| And I know maces and clubs, they look like weapons, but they're not weapons, okay? | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're just exercise equipment. | ||
| And it's exercise equipment that mimics the use of weapons because, believe it or not, those dudes who had to swing swords, you have to live in Game of Thrones time, you have to be strong as shit, man, to be able to swing a big giant piece of metal. | ||
| I'm not advocating any sword use, but I'm saying when you use something like that, like a steel mace or a steel club, using these weapon-like pieces of exercise equipment, it actually makes you use your body as one whole unit. | ||
| And it improves your athletic performance in other areas, like if you have a sport that you do or if it's a martial arts thing, the strength and fitness that you can get from a good kettlebell workout or a mace workout, it really does do you some great benefits. | ||
| So go and check it out. | ||
| Use the code name ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| That's O-N-N-I-T. | ||
| Alex Gray is here, you dirty freaks. | ||
| So strap in, open up your third eye, get your shit together, and away we go. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day. | ||
| Jesus Louisa Jesus. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| We're sending emails. | ||
| I'll explain who the person on the podcast is today. | ||
| One of my favorite artists in the history of the universe. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| There's a small handful of people that I would have liked to meet more than you. | ||
| Having you on the podcast the first time was a true honor and a treat. | ||
| And it's just cool to be in contact with you. | ||
| I think you represent a very positive and a very unusual force in the world of art and in the world of consciousness as well. | ||
| Your artwork is so moving and so representative of the psychedelic state that it actually has an effect on people. | ||
| I think your artwork is probably some of the The most accurate psychedelic artwork I've ever seen. | ||
| I can't tell you how many people I've been with that have seen your artwork or seen one of your pieces for the first time and just went, Fuck! | ||
| That's like the usual reaction when they see one of your crazier pieces. | ||
| The one that I always think of when I think of you is these three faces. | ||
| They look like Egyptian sort of pharaoh type faces and they're all three. | ||
| One is facing forward and two on the sides and it just seems like a DMT trip. | ||
| It seems like you're tripping when you're watching it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, it's an attempt to point to the embeddedness that we are in time, the flow of time, and yet that there is always a timeless being that we also are, the witness of that being in time. | ||
| Why is that so terrifying? | ||
| Because we are in time and there's a countdown, you know, where none of us get out alive, etc., etc. | ||
| Yeah, hey Ray, hey, we love you. | ||
| Yeah, he just passed. | ||
| It really is a weird thing though to see it so clearly captured in artwork. | ||
| And it's one of the weirdest things that people point to when they point to either ancient religious art or... | ||
| You know, just various things where it's hard to find evidence of psychedelic use in their art. | ||
| It's hard to find moments where they – like this is one. | ||
| It's hard – there was nothing like this that came out of the old world. | ||
| And it's fascinating to me because if McKenna was right with this idea of the stoned ape theory and that mushrooms probably shaped human culture, it's like clearly there were long periods of time probably where people weren't getting that. | ||
| Yeah, but there was a continual evolution of the ability to express the dimensions of the world and of the imaginal worlds. | ||
| And you can see it from cave art, which they now believe That even the Neanderthal may have had early form of cave art. | ||
| So it wasn't just the Cro-Max, but we may have had ancestors who were also artists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The cave art is one of the weirder things about ancient man. | ||
| Have you seen the Werner Herzog documentary about the ancient cave art? | ||
| I believe it was in France, is that where it was? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What is it called? | ||
| Cave of Dreams? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| I actually didn't see it, and I've heard all about it, and I really want to, you know, and I haven't yet. | ||
| Oh, it's one of those things, yeah. | ||
| Did you love it? | ||
| Yeah, I only got a chance, I was running out the door when it was on, so I only got a chance to see it for about an hour, but it was fascinating. | ||
| Just the idea that they were painting these incredible things, what was it, 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, something crazy like that. | ||
| And this is some of the oldest stuff. | ||
| Just does the idea that you're looking at something that someone 40,000 years ago drew, it seems so insane. | ||
| But it also seems like a blip. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| When you really stop and think about 40,000 years to go from that to us, from drawing on rocks as being your main form of expression, like drawing buffalo, to 40,000 years later taking pictures of yourself and sending them to people on the other side of the planet. | ||
| It's not that far. | ||
| 30,000 years is like really quick to do that. | ||
| We're still making pictures. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And making pictures is becoming an even more important part of communication. | ||
| What do you think that is, that feeling that you get when you see a piece of art, when you see something beautiful? | ||
| When you see something, even if it's the same feeling for me, it's almost exactly the same thing. | ||
| When I see nature, a beautiful scene in nature, as I see a beautiful human creation. | ||
| So it seems to have no differentiation in my imagination. | ||
| When I see a beautiful sunset or a beautiful forest, you know? | ||
| In the mountains and a lake and that perfect classic scene. | ||
| Or if I see a beautiful painting or a beautiful piece of art, it's the same thing. | ||
| It gives you that, wow! | ||
| That's what we're looking for all the time. | ||
| This powerful expression. | ||
| We crave it. | ||
| I think it's actually something that human beings, you know, either secretly or not so secretly crave. | ||
| In looking at other people and in finding it in their lives, I kind of think that's almost an aesthetic and spiritual quest in itself. | ||
| To find the beauty in the moment, in every moment, is actually quite a Profound state to be in, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just such a strange thing to be able to do. | ||
| You know, if you looked at it, if you were outside of human culture, and you said, what are they doing there? | ||
| They're creating beautiful things, and they all look at it and get a positive feeling from it. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| How strange. | ||
| Like, that image serves no other function other than to express themselves? | ||
| No, they can't eat it. | ||
| They don't make houses out of it. | ||
| They just make it and they look at it and stare at it and they think it's awesome. | ||
| Well, you know, in the back of the dollar bill, they have that somewhat Masonic-looking pyramid with the eye in the triangle floating above. | ||
| And so it's an unfinished pyramid. | ||
| And I've heard it interpreted as the individual or the nation as incomplete. | ||
| Without guidance by higher vision. | ||
| And so the aspiration for a higher vision is what distinguishes maybe a sacred art and a psychedelic art that aims at a universal kind of mystical visionary experience and just kind of fantasy art. | ||
| Because I think that with the Widespread use of psychedelics. | ||
| So many people have seen these realms that that's why it causes a bit of a When people see it sometimes, it's because they've seen it inside themselves, but maybe not outside themselves. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost like a familiar image. | ||
| Even though it's so bizarrely outrageous, you're just like, wow, have I seen this goddamn thing before? | ||
| What is it about? | ||
| Especially that one with the three heads. | ||
| That one really knocked my socks off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're going to make a whole building like that, man? | ||
| That's what the Entheon is about. | ||
| That's too much. | ||
| I can't take that. | ||
| Well, it's all the way around. | ||
| I know. | ||
| 20-foot heads. | ||
| It's going to be the coolest place on the planet Earth. | ||
| That is, without a doubt, going to be the coolest building on the planet Earth. | ||
| There's nothing cooler than that. | ||
| You made an Alex Gray building. | ||
| And an Allison Gray building. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| This is her sacred language that is the thing that binds the building together. | ||
| That looks straight out of a piece of the wreckage from Roswell. | ||
| That's what I would expect that writing to come from. | ||
| That looks awesome. | ||
| If human language... | ||
| That looks like something someone would get tattooed on them. | ||
| They wouldn't even know what it meant. | ||
| It just looks so cool. | ||
| Well, you know, I thought you could, you know, if you had like one head here and then it... | ||
| It could go completely around the body or something. | ||
| Oh, someone will do that now that you just suggested it. | ||
| Someone will definitely do that. | ||
| Or you could make a t-shirt or something. | ||
| Maybe that's a good move, yeah. | ||
| Are you going to sell t-shirts for me? | ||
| People would love to have this t-shirt, I guarantee you. | ||
| Well, you know, there's an Entheon t-shirt that we're going to be working on. | ||
| We should explain to people what Entheon is if they didn't listen to the first podcast. | ||
| Essentially, you've created your own religion. | ||
| Everybody's always said that wouldn't it be amazing if somebody created a religion... | ||
| That actually wasn't based on anything ancient or based on trying to get your money, but based on the true principles of love and the word that you like to use all the time, God. | ||
| You want to take that word back. | ||
| You're trying to take that word back from the Bible bangers. | ||
| But it's kind of an amazing thing to do because I know you and I know what you're about. | ||
| You're not doing this for any nefarious reasons. | ||
| You're doing it for the perfect reasons. | ||
| And that's really rare where someone has a voice and they choose to just go all in like that. | ||
| You've created religion, man. | ||
| Well, it's an orientation toward the spiritual. | ||
| Legitimately spiritual. | ||
| We'll say religion because that's within the embrace of the expanding and evolving spirit of humanity. | ||
| We have to start thinking as a planetary civilization. | ||
| And the Internet has helped us all to form an image of a networked kind of distributed intelligence that goes all around the world. | ||
| Yeah, that's happened before people even realized it. | ||
| It's already crept up on people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's now kind of the ocean in which we swim, but by making note of it, we notice it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so by the power of that community that connects virtually with each other, The Kickstarter campaign for the building of Entheon has been going strongly and just creeping upward every day and just today broke the 100,000 mark. | ||
| We're going toward 125, and we've got about nine days left. | ||
| So how do they get to this, if people want to contribute to this Kickstarter? | ||
| Well, they can go to kickstarter.com and go Entheon. | ||
| Where do they put that? | ||
| In the search. | ||
|
unidentified
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I just Googled Alex. | |
| There you go. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Okay, just Google that. | ||
| Google Alex Craig Kickstarter. | ||
| And what you're doing is essentially you're building a temple. | ||
| You're building a work of art. | ||
| It's kind of fascinating because if a lot of people who believe that psychedelic drugs are at the heart of almost all religions and psychedelic experience and psychedelic imagery in ancient religious artwork where there's things that represent mushrooms and shapes that are mushrooms. | ||
| These incredible buildings that have been built for religion. | ||
| I mean if you really stop and think about some of the greatest architectural achievements, it's been like the most beautiful ones have been the ones that were created for religions. | ||
| It's like they – in whatever part of what they are that is good, wanting to achieve some higher level, they've done it with their art, with their architecture, with You look at some of the ancient Roman architecture that's dedicated to the Catholic Church, it's staggering stuff. | ||
| Outside of the creepiness of the Catholic Church, which is undeniable, and I came from it, the architectural artwork is just masterful. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| It's like nothing else, you know... | ||
| Michelangelo. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You know, the greatest of all geniuses, artistic, you know, architectural and his paintings and sculptures. | ||
| Do you think that any of those guys tripped? | ||
| Well, you know, he was a Neoplatonist. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, that means he was an idealist and that he had just become familiar with the We're looking at the image in 3D. That is insane. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm sorry, so keep going. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So you spun around a little bit and got to see all the heads. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's cool. | |
| That is amazing. | ||
| So all these works are going to be on view within Entheon. | ||
| Dude, you can change people's lives just with these pictures. | ||
| They're so trippy. | ||
| They make you like that one right there. | ||
| That makes you go, okay, what is real and what's not real? | ||
| That thing's too freaky. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is reality? | ||
| Why is that image so familiar? | ||
| Because we are connected with everything, you know? | ||
| I mean, look, all the mystic traditions talk about there's only one of us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All of them, yeah. | ||
| And so that's the foundation of the understanding is a sense of oneness. | ||
| The idea of the networked self and of a planetary sense of humanity is, I think, wearing away the nationhood and nation-state I deal toward a hopeful and democratic but will struggle for some time with that. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a possibility. | ||
| I have hope for people. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I think the internet is what gives me the most hope because I think that it's the first time people have ever had a straight pipe. | ||
| Everybody has a straight pipe to everybody else and information is settling and people are starting to understand, they have a greater understanding of what constitutes a happy life and how to achieve happiness and how to Surround yourself with positive people and how to express yourself in a healthy way. | ||
| And that's all the Internet. | ||
| The Internet has given people, I think, a way better understanding of life itself than any generation has ever had before. | ||
| And so to have this and to create it with the Internet. | ||
| It's kind of perfect. | ||
| It's kind of beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, like crowdsourcing sacred space. | ||
| It could only happen today with friends. | ||
| Well, because of people like you, though, that are doing things like that, that's one of the reasons why I have faith. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why I think that... | ||
| I know a lot of people gravitate towards your stuff. | ||
| A lot of people gravitate towards your words. | ||
| And they gravitate towards your artwork. | ||
| And I think that gives me hope. | ||
| I think that there's people that are trying to put themselves on a good frequency. | ||
| And there's people that are not. | ||
| There's people that are just unbelievably negative. | ||
| They'll never let it go. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But they're at that phase of the alchemical journey of healing. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It's like, I don't know. | ||
| It's all, I think... | ||
| There's a spectrum, for sure. | ||
| There's a spectrum of fortune, luck, the luck of the draw of where you were born, who you're associated with, your family. | ||
| That's an undeniable... | ||
| Luck of the draw. | ||
| I thank every day I grew up with the people I grew up with. | ||
| I got really lucky with my parents. | ||
| They were really nice. | ||
| That's not the case with everybody, and that's luck. | ||
| Some people are just born into such a massive deficit. | ||
| I got a few years on you, I think. | ||
| I recently read about a Schopenhauer essay where he talks about how almost everyone at a certain age looks back on their life and even events that appeared random during their occurrence appeared to have been fated. | ||
| And took them in a particular direction and that really had become very important for them. | ||
| And so it's curious because, I mean, it was like that with meeting Allison. | ||
| It was like that with taking LSD. It was, you know, there... | ||
| Momentous and life-changing kind of occurrences and they can turn you from a sour And suicidal person to a person that has a love for life and a commitment to trying to leave the most... | ||
| the gift that you've been sort of requested to perform. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, the service you've been asked to perform. | |
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, Entheon is a sanctuary of visionary art and that's always been our aspiration is to provide a more, on a more permanent basis, | ||
| of course that's still an aspiration at this point, but That we did acquire the land of 40-acre property and we do have permission now after over a couple of years of negotiation and preparation of site plan and getting site plan approval from the town. | ||
| We now have the permission to build Entheon and it is And the Kickstarter has been a way of connecting with this net of beings that have also taken on the imagining of it with us and the financing of it. | ||
| Where do you see this going? | ||
| Do you see this becoming Entheon? | ||
| Once Entheon is built, what if a bunch of people want to move into the property? | ||
| Would you consider setting houses? | ||
| We have a guest house. | ||
| You have a guest house? | ||
| Yes, we have a guest house to receive them and it is open now for business. | ||
| We've been hosting numerous people that come and stay there already. | ||
| We're open on a more weekly basis now. | ||
| But it's just a beautiful time of the year, and there's wisdom trails you can walk around, and there's some art in the house. | ||
| The cosmic Christ is there. | ||
| How far in is the construction process? | ||
| Well, we have done reinforcing of the carriage house around which this building is going to be, the heads are going to be clad. | ||
| And for folks who are just listening on iTunes, you can see it if you go to alexgray.com and go look at some of the images. | ||
| It's the weirdest, craziest, coolest looking building I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| And if you do completely build it this way, it's really going to be one of the coolest things on earth. | ||
| I mean it's a building that's a work of art and it's a stunning work of art. | ||
| It really is badass. | ||
| It's very interesting because it makes a statement and I see it as within a lineage of the development of different kinds of sacred architecture and just one other little bud on that tree. | ||
| But it's attempting to point to the underlying Unity of the quest for wisdom and compassion and all the different religious quests and that they have, they share also in common the angel of creative expression which is the imagination and all World religions were born in the creative imagination | ||
| with the visionary mystical experience. | ||
| There was the founding of Islam on the journey of Muhammad to the seventh heaven, and he encounters many visionary kinds of dimensions on the way. | ||
| You know, receives his wisdom. | ||
| And, you know, you have Mary receiving an angel. | ||
| You know, you have Moses talking to a burning bush. | ||
| All of these are visionary mystical experiences and they're the foundations of many of the world religions. | ||
| Mara is dispelled in the visionary experience with the Buddha. | ||
| The soldiers, the Buddha turns the arrows into flowers. | ||
| These are all kinds of visionary, mystical contact with an infinite, intermediate realm between the physical, material world and the transcendental world. | ||
| And all the really mystical traditions have them. | ||
| We've just kind of lost track of them, except now we've recovered them through psychedelics. | ||
| Do you think that that was the heart of – you feel like that was the heart of all organized religion? | ||
| That originally it was some sort of a psychedelic experience? | ||
| Well, a mystical experience. | ||
| So it could have been like yoga or kundalini or something like that? | ||
| It can happen on the natch and it has for many but for some fasting and there are numerous kinds of austerities and things like that. | ||
| It could have been a natural part of life. | ||
| Yes, I haven't been eating for three days, but the water is a little tasting funny. | ||
| And lo and behold, there's a vision and an angel appears. | ||
| People would say, hey, yeah, you're about to die. | ||
| You're hallucinating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or just eat this and you'll be okay soon. | ||
| So you can go to the edge and see the other world as well. | ||
| And that It can be valid as well. | ||
| One of the weird things about psychedelics is people always, even if it was one of the most profound experiences ever and one of the most amazing experiences ever, people will tell you, yeah, but it was just your mind playing tricks on you. | ||
| Like, it doesn't matter. | ||
| And you can go, okay, but whether I really did travel to another dimension and communicate with infinite beings that were made out of love and understanding, who told me the secret to life is positive energy and positive... | ||
| Even if it was just my imagination, I still experienced it. | ||
| I experienced it as if it was real. | ||
| So whether it was real or whether it wasn't real, I get the exact same result. | ||
| Something happened that was unbelievably incredible. | ||
| It took me to some place that was infinitely beautiful, and then something happened to me. | ||
| Either that happened or it didn't happen. | ||
| Well, it definitely happened. | ||
| It doesn't matter if it was imaginary. | ||
| It doesn't matter if it was only inside my head. | ||
| The whole world comes out of the inside of your head. | ||
| When we're kids, I remember when I was a kid, they would say like, oh, he's got such an imagination, this one. | ||
| It was talking about kids that were liars. | ||
| That's how people treated the imagination. | ||
| The kids were just fibbers. | ||
| Because that's imagination to some people. | ||
| Some people, they didn't think it was something to be encouraged. | ||
| But it's really where everything comes from. | ||
| And that's the weirdest thing about it, is the imagination conjures up an idea which becomes a laptop. | ||
| It conjures up an idea which becomes an airplane. | ||
| It all comes from the imagination. | ||
| Whether it's artistic, whether it's a song, whether it's a joke, it's the weirdest thing ever. | ||
| And everybody wants to pretend that it's so normal. | ||
| It's so normal you're just thinking shit up out of the middle of fucking nowhere and creating nuclear power. | ||
| You know, what did you do? | ||
| You sat down and you wrote some stuff on a pad and then you figured it out? | ||
| Where's this all coming from? | ||
| Where's the idea to even do that coming from? | ||
| Where's the idea that some guy wants to be like a fucking bird and put wings on and figure out how to fly? | ||
| And he eventually figures it out. | ||
| Now we just travel all over the world and we don't think anything of it. | ||
| I mean, the imagination is crazy. | ||
| The imagination has done some amazing things for human beings in this world. | ||
| And yet we still don't give it the credit it deserves. | ||
| It's kind of shocking. | ||
| Imagination is like the most underrated thing of all time. | ||
| And yet it's the foundation of all our advancement and evolution. | ||
| And people are like, what you need is to work hard. | ||
| Don't have a fucking imagination sitting there seeing some shit that's not there. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Well, I think that that's the other thing that the visionary experience with psychedelics does is it convinces people of the existence of the realms. | ||
| And if they, you know, suddenly find themselves in a DMT space, you know, it's like very unsettling, perhaps. | ||
| But then at least you can see that there is a there there. | ||
| There is an infinite there there. | ||
| And so this inner consciousness experience that the The one self is having through us is something I'm just fascinated by. | ||
| I'm fascinated by how the mystics get at the one. | ||
| Do you think, and this has always been a very strange one amongst the mushroom connoisseurs of the world, some believe that in consuming that life form Which is really closer to animal than it is to plant, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And consuming that mushroom, what you're doing is that's how it communicates with you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then these visions that you're getting, this information that you're getting, just almost downloaded to you in a way that you can't understand or even comprehend most of it. | ||
| I always describe trying to remember what you're learning on mushrooms like trying to grab fish in a river. | ||
| I can't fucking grab anything. | ||
| I can't hold on to it. | ||
| It's just too crazy. | ||
| I'm seeing too much. | ||
| I'm trying to calm down, but I'm seeing too much. | ||
| And then you sort of go, oh, okay, this is where everything comes from. | ||
| It comes from this crazy place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The endless imagination and in flowing streams just like that. | ||
| And most of the big ones get away. | ||
| And then a few are just life-altering. | ||
| And the thing that really welded Allison and I together, because it was my first acid trip in her apartment that opened me up to the world of light and the world of a higher possibility. | ||
| Beyond suicide and nihilism and all that. | ||
| Was that how you were approaching life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think the cause of that is? | ||
| Is that environmental? | ||
| Is it behavioral? | ||
| Is it pattern that you get into? | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| I was 20, 21, and probably there's something chemical going on. | ||
| Hormonal changes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Possibly. | |
| I was wondering whether I was crazy. | ||
| We had a steady diet of kind of nihilist and existentialist authors and it reinforced the sense of absurdity because I thought that was what sophisticated artists would want to put into their work was a healthy dose of nihilism and cynicism and sarcasm and all that and yet that also felt very wrong. | ||
| It's very competitive. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anyway, I was struggling with this kind of polarity kind of situation and prone to extremes and things like that. | ||
| My prayer in the morning was basically You know, God, if you exist, you know, show yourself because I'm tired of life, you know. | ||
| At 21, right. | ||
| Oh my God, that's so crazy. | ||
| And so it was kind of like a challenge. | ||
| It was kind of like, yeah, right, show me. | ||
| And so, and I was, nothing happened. | ||
| It's art school. | ||
| I was saying goodbye to my professor on the corner. | ||
| Around the corner comes Allison in a VW. Says, hey, I'm having a party later tonight. | ||
| Hey, why don't you come on over? | ||
| And the professor picks me up and says, hey, I've got some clue in acid. | ||
| And so, hey, I was going to kill myself. | ||
| The professor had acid? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a cool professor. | ||
| He was very cool. | ||
| You don't get those kind of professors anymore. | ||
| Was that Columbus College of Art and Design? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was out in the museum school in California. | ||
| Boston. | ||
| In Boston? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where we met. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, in conceptual art. | ||
| Where's that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Let's see, it's on the Fenway, you know, near Gardner Museum, where the Museum of Fine Arts is. | ||
| I grew up in Newton. | ||
| The suburb. | ||
| I went back recently. | ||
| It was really interesting. | ||
| We were driving around. | ||
| I forgot how historic certain parts of Boston are. | ||
| When you look at graveyards that are from the 1600s and really old buildings, you're like, wow, I forgot. | ||
| This is a historic town. | ||
| Well, I always felt very much at home in Boston. | ||
| Did you hang around with any Irish drunks? | ||
| Because that would change your mind. | ||
| With the quickness. | ||
| Irish drunks on coke. | ||
| I knew a lot of those. | ||
| Italian ones as well. | ||
| I don't want to discriminate. | ||
| The people that I liked was the kind of philosophical tradition that was there. | ||
| I loved Emerson for instance and Thoreau and William James there at Harvard and then later Tim Leary and Ram Dass and those guys. | ||
| And so there was a tradition of a kind of altered states and they did a lot of the experimentation, the original experiments with Walter Pankey when he did the Good Friday experiment. | ||
| It's an amazing city as far as like education goes. | ||
| I think it has more colleges per capita than anywhere else in the world or in the country rather. | ||
| And I also think if you think about like Harvard and MIT both in the same city. | ||
| I mean it's Cambridge but what are the odds of that? | ||
| Cambridge is basically Boston. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's like, wow, what a crazy town for smart people. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| If they were so smart, why would they be there? | ||
| It's so cold. | ||
| Well, they hunker in and work hard. | ||
| Yeah, it makes you a hard worker. | ||
| That's for damn sure. | ||
| You grow up with a work ethic. | ||
| I grew up, I learned how to work hard because everyone around me worked hard. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| I got lucky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, well, for sure, trust me, there's a lot of luck involved. | |
| But, you know, growing up with people in Boston, like, it really definitely, when that fucking winter comes, man, you gotta be prepared. | ||
| See, I love California, but there's something about it, like, I even look at my kids and I'm like, you know what, it'd do you good to freeze your ass off every now and then. | ||
| It could do you good to realize that you got to get in the house because it's cold outside, you know, to know that that shit's out there. | ||
| I think there's a humility that comes with having to deal with weather. | ||
| And unfortunately, as we're saying this podcast, a bunch of people died in Oklahoma with a horrible tornado. | ||
| So, you know, we have to acknowledge how sad that is and how fucking crazy it is that there's a part of the world where The sky becomes an angry machine, monster, you know, spinning wind that picks up semi-trailers and sends them flying through the air. | ||
| That is horrific. | ||
| Move out of Oklahoma, by the way. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Move out of Oklahoma, by the way. | ||
| Well, a lot of them can't, man. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| A lot of people are poor, you know, and they've been there for years, and their family's there. | ||
| It's not that easy to just kind of pack up your shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just go to Michigan. | |
| It's cheaper. | ||
| It's definitely cheaper. | ||
| More bullets, though. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Around Detroit, apparently. | ||
| Detroit is like the worst place in the world to be a book. | ||
| They say that Detroit has a 47% illiteracy rate in Detroit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you make that up? | |
| I just made it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| It's crazy if you really stop and think about it. | ||
| 47% illiteracy rate? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| No one's paying attention to anybody. | ||
| The government should absolutely focus on situations like that. | ||
| The idea that we shouldn't intervene in places where it's gotten so out of hand that half the people can't read. | ||
| That should be thought of as an epidemic. | ||
| Because all of those people that can't read are going to give birth to children that probably can't read either. | ||
| And you have thousands, if not millions of people who can't read, and then they're going to enter into the world unprepared, unprepared to communicate, to exchange information, to be able to find things out for themselves. | ||
| I have to take a bunch of people's words for things because you can't read things. | ||
| I mean there's so much involved in being illiterate. | ||
| The fact that there's like millions of potential crazy people that are going to go through life completely illiterate in 2013 and no one is up in arms about that. | ||
| It's really kind of shocking. | ||
| It is and it's something each one of us has to focus on in whatever way we can. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to make a person. | ||
| It's hard to raise a human being. | ||
| It's not an easy thing. | ||
| And when we're looking at human beings that are being raised in really terrible conditions, it should be one of the first things the whole world concentrates on. | ||
| Before you concentrate on—I mean, it sounds so hippie, but it seems like if you really want to have a happy life, you've got to be doing more good than you are harm. | ||
| And there's got to be a way to do that first. | ||
| There's got to be a way to say, look, there's X amount of people in the world that are starving. | ||
| Let's all globally chip in to try to stop that from happening so that these starving people don't have starving children who never get a chance to get some momentum in life and be comfortable and happy. | ||
| It never comes. | ||
| It never comes. | ||
| To just give them a chance? | ||
| Wouldn't that be like the most important thing you could ever do? | ||
| It would seem. | ||
| As a race? | ||
| It would seem. | ||
| To stop the worst conditions. | ||
| To stop the worst conditions. | ||
| But Sam Kinison had the best bit about that. | ||
| Oh, it was so cruel, but it was so amazing. | ||
| What'd he say? | ||
| He was talking about Ethiopian children. | ||
| Oh, they have those commercials. | ||
| He's always like, just fix yourself some dinner. | ||
| You're sitting there in this commercial, and he's like, won't you help him? | ||
| Won't you send it? | ||
| He's like, why don't you help him? | ||
| You're only five feet away. | ||
| He's got behind the camera. | ||
| He's got a Snickers bar going, not now, not now. | ||
| Shut the camera. | ||
| It was one of the best bits ever. | ||
| He was like, we have deserts in America too. | ||
| We just don't live in them, asshole. | ||
| Yeah, like he said that we, you know, I forget how it goes. | ||
| It's something about, yeah, we sent, we came over here with your food and it occurred to us that you wouldn't need food if you people would move where the food is. | ||
| Like you live in a fucking desert. | ||
| And he grabs him and he puts his face in the sand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See who that is? | |
| That's sand. | ||
| You know what's going to be a thousand years from now? | ||
| Fucking sand! | ||
| It's a terrible, mean bit. | ||
| Even though Kennison's dead. | ||
| Long dead. | ||
| Still, it's such a mean bit. | ||
| But it was hilarious. | ||
| It crossed that line of being fucking mean but so funny. | ||
| Like, oh, you motherfucker. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| He was a wild motherfucker, Sam Kennison. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| We were talking about Hicks before the show started. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We both thought that Hicks was the first truly psychedelic comedian who had psychedelic ideas that he was putting forth. | ||
| Some of them weren't even that funny. | ||
| They were just incredibly profound. | ||
| That it was in the middle of some other shit that was funny was what was so weird about it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And that's how he would drop those meaningful mind bombs into your psyche so that They kind of melted and stayed. | ||
| He knew how to kind of stain your consciousness with a new perception. | ||
| And a lot of his stuff still holds up. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Especially if you haven't heard it before. | ||
| It still holds up. | ||
| Because what he was saying about the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, by the way, that was when he was railing against a machine. | ||
| It's just like you could just take it and substitute the words and it works today. | ||
| It worked with George W. It works with Obama. | ||
| The material works. | ||
| Just substitute this guy for that guy and it's still relevant. | ||
| He gave birth to a whole completely different style of comedian. | ||
| The style of comedian that came after him was like they wanted to educate you. | ||
| Which is really weird because some of them were idiots. | ||
| So there was on the wall of the back, the green room at the Dallas, no, the Atlanta punchline, there's a big sign that says, don't stop trying to be hicks. | ||
| Oh, quit trying to be hicks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there were so many guys that were doing that. | ||
| There were so many guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it was just so amazing to watch that he like, I mean, Dr. Amit Goswami, he's a physicist, one of those particle guys, had a funny thing to say about people that were sort of faking it. | ||
| He was like, he goes, let them. | ||
| He goes, I let them use the word quantum if they don't understand it, because maybe it'll have them seek to understand it now. | ||
| And I remember hearing, I'm like, wow. | ||
| That's so profound. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I would have never thought that far ahead. | ||
| Like, he's, like, letting people fake it, not calling them on it, just so they just keep looking into it. | ||
| If they're intrigued, then why should he be the stop? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Why should he be able to, like, listen, bitch, you know you don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| Hicks made a lot of people aware of psychedelics, too. | ||
| There was a lot of people that did not know anything about heroic doses or any of that shit. | ||
| Hicks was the first stand-up comedian to ever talk about things that way. | ||
| The other ones that would talk about mushrooms, they would be like, hey, we did mushrooms, and we got all goofy, and Bobby thought he was a horse. | ||
| That's usually the story. | ||
| What Hicks was describing was like, what is this guy seeing? | ||
| How come it's different than everybody else that takes mushrooms? | ||
| I think it was so interesting and fascinating when he would talk about it that it just led a lot of people to explore that. | ||
| I think he was another kind of apostle in a kind of nightclub setting. | ||
| Yeah, and digitally he still is. | ||
| We can still hear his words. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because we resonate with the authenticity and the rawness that he projected and with a psychedelic perspective that allowed him a kind of brutal honesty and yet There was something remarkably magnetic because he was like a laser about the truth it seemed. | ||
| That was what he wanted to be about even at the – and to reveal a kind of underlying darkness was something that he was an expert at. | ||
| Yeah, he really was. | ||
| And he had a lot of references that he would use in his material that would make you seek out other shit. | ||
| Like what Terrence McKenna would call a heroic dose, you know? | ||
| And I was like, who the fuck is Terrence McKenna? | ||
| And then I started reading about Terrence McKenna going, whoa, this guy. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I started reading Food of the Gods, and I was like, oh my god. | ||
| I'm like, where's this guy been? | ||
| You know, I mean, Hicks exposes people, or did expose people. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| And then once you got into the McKenna door, then you were off to the races. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Once you start listening to those McKenna MP3s that are available online, you want to talk about something that will just crack your consciousness. | ||
| Those McKenna MP3s of some of those lectures that he gave, he just... | ||
| That guy had a very strange way of thinking. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I used to think of him as the... | ||
| The spokesmonkey for the mushroom, you know, that he was kind of plugged in to that. | ||
| But he and his brother are both extraordinary in their intersection with the plant kingdom and the fungal kingdom. | ||
| And Cat McKenna as well, who continues the work at Botanical Dimensions. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Was it a story they told of La Chujera where they took too much and Dennis kind of went radio silent for a couple of weeks? | ||
| Went completely crazy for a while? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're dealing with dinner plate size mushrooms and they're eating them all day. | ||
| Would you like to interview Dennis? | ||
| I've had him on. | ||
| Oh, you've had him on? | ||
| I bet you did. | ||
| Oh, he was great. | ||
| With the Brothers of the Screaming Abyss? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| We talked about his book. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| We just talked about psychedelics. | ||
| And we talked very specifically about the actual science behind the possibility of psychedelics creating language, particularly psilocybin. | ||
| And he was explaining how it would make sense that language was created through the use of psilocybin by Virtue of the effect that psilocybin has in a very scientific way that I can't recreate. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, and I was like, oh, I never even heard anybody say it that way before. | ||
| But that completely makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Obviously one theory, and I don't understand really what he's saying. | ||
| It just sounds awesome. | ||
| You know, I don't know whether or not there's some science to it where other people might disagree with it. | ||
| Let's say that it's commonplace for people to want to express themselves creatively. | ||
| In the wake of a psychedelic experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was going to ask you though. | ||
| Why do you think that is that people would dismiss that? | ||
| Why do you think it is that people would ridicule that? | ||
| Like someone saying that you actually learned something from a psychedelic experience. | ||
| You say that to the average person and they'll look at you with ridicule. | ||
| Like how did that happen do you think? | ||
| Well, I – I'd like the listeners to help us think of a word to place that in the same context as homophobia or misogyny or Something like racism. | ||
| Why do people who alter their consciousness or who speak of it inspire the hysteria in people that don't take them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a funny old Timothy Leary. | |
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| That's a great, great line. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that for a lot of folks, first of all, they equate drugs with bad. | ||
| They think of drugs – the problem is meth is a drug too, and meth wrecks lives. | ||
| Cocaine is a drug too. | ||
| Cocaine fucks people up. | ||
| But then there's pot, which doesn't, and then there's mushrooms, which doesn't. | ||
| These are – they're all drugs though. | ||
| Well, I mean you could look at some as a food drug. | ||
| And it's better maybe to classify some as a sacrament that have been a sacrament for longer than they were a, quote, drug. | ||
| They were a way that people connected with the higher dimensions. | ||
| What is the term entheogen? | ||
| What is the actual translation of that? | ||
| Entheo. | ||
| Theo, of course, is god or the divine. | ||
| And Entheo would be the divine within. | ||
| A bunch of dudes that are really douchey just decided to name their son Theo after hearing that. | ||
| That's my boy, the god. | ||
| The god Theo. | ||
| Fucking awesome. | ||
| So that's what Entheogen means. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's from the god? | ||
| It's a way to discover or a... | ||
| A substance that allows you to discover the God within or the divine within, the spirit within. | ||
| I don't blame people that discriminate against psychedelics if they haven't had psychedelics. | ||
| I think it's just an ignorance thing. | ||
| I think people have a lot of bad ideas and they don't necessarily think it's their responsibility to be right about something that they haven't experienced themselves. | ||
| And that is – in society, it's sort of – it's looked down upon. | ||
| It's looked down upon to alter your consciousness like that, that if you do it, you're probably looking to escape reality. | ||
| That's like the standard take on it. | ||
| Yet many of these people would consider themselves to be religious people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| So if you look at the foundations of all world religions as we've just gone through it, we can see that they were based on this visionary mystical experience. | ||
| Which is what we're saying is of value for everyone. | ||
| Yeah, but Alex, that was thousands of years ago. | ||
| We don't want it anymore. | ||
| If Jesus came around today, no one would believe him. | ||
| If there was some dude that was claiming that he was the son of God, he was giving wisdom to everybody, they'd probably put him in Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| There's no way they would let that guy just run around running shit. | ||
| I think there's a lot of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
People, God-inspired people are on the loose. | |
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| They're just like spores. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But the idea of the one, a messiah coming back, a magical messiah with power to bring back people from the dead... | ||
| Did I already say my theory about the second coming? | ||
| No. | ||
| I would love to hear it. | ||
| You're smiling like a little kid right now. | ||
| Okay, because I thought I repeat myself endlessly. | ||
| Welcome to the podcast. | ||
| That's what we do here. | ||
| Okay, so the first coming of Christ was the revelation of the connection of, basically of the divinity of humanity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was the revelation. | ||
| And the second coming, through a kind of idiosyncratic In this tradition that is coming out of South America, | ||
| a lot of ayahuasca churches all over the world are drinking and contacting this higher dimension through the ayahuasca. | ||
| In no demeaning way, I call it the green Jesus. | ||
| And Green Mary, really, because it's revealing the divinity of nature. | ||
| And there's nothing more important right now than recognizing the divinity and the sacredness of nature and saving the life-web in whatever ways we can. | ||
| Somehow turning our ship around from a self-destructive species. | ||
| You know, this is the tight place we're heading into. | ||
| It is, but hasn't it always been like this? | ||
| Isn't this the yin and the yang that makes people human? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Is this the push and the pull? | ||
| Sometimes we need to rally against an impending doom in order to... | ||
| Oh, God, I know. | ||
| It's a part of being a person. | ||
| We're goofy. | ||
| We want to cram for tests. | ||
| We're adolescent species and wildly destructive. | ||
| And we only exist through the grace of the kind of spirits that are tolerant because we're so creative, I think, that they hope that we will work on this together with the intelligence that's That's seeding today. | ||
| And we've also been born in a super lucky spot. | ||
| As far as the history of humanity, we didn't have to go through the people trying to make it across the west with wagon trains. | ||
| We didn't have to go through any of that. | ||
| We're lucky. | ||
| We have internet. | ||
| Perhaps we'll be floating in some astral dimension in the next lifetime. | ||
| That's possible, too. | ||
| Do you feel you have a responsibility? | ||
| The fact that you have this voice and you're looked at as this sort of psychedelic visionary guy, do you feel like you have a responsibility to try to get information out, things that you've learned, things that you think possibly could help people? | ||
| Because you obviously have a vision of things and you obviously have a very well thought out view of humanity and of consciousness. | ||
| Do you feel that you have an obligation to express these thoughts? | ||
| I think that anyone who experiences the deeper realms Maybe has a turnabout in their conscience. | ||
| It's not just about higher consciousness, but there's a sense that if you're connected with everyone and with everything, then what's your moral responsibility or your ethical response to your interconnectedness? | ||
| There's a bunch of hippies who just took their pants off right now. | ||
| They're like, I can't take it. | ||
| This guy's too love. | ||
| It's too much love, man. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Well, I think that there's a natural resistance to allowing it to be as magnificent as it actually is. | ||
| There's also a fear of the unknown, too. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| People that haven't had it, I think that's why I don't fault them, the ones who are anti... | ||
| A lot of people associate drugs with ruining your life, not with saving your life. | ||
| They're capable of both. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| In my case, it was the other. | ||
| It was the saving my life and meeting my wife and 39 years later, here we are. | ||
| Whatever seed was born in the saving of a life and giving a literal turning point and saying, can you see me now? | ||
| Well, a switch literally was turned on and you became a different person. | ||
| Like shedding a cocoon and a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or whatever the fuck happens whenever you have a really profound experience. | ||
| But some people don't do that. | ||
| Some people do. | ||
| This is what I say is that a really profound psychedelic experience is like control-alt-delete for your consciousness where your brain… It reboots with a fresh operating system. | ||
| And there's only one folder on the desktop. | ||
| And the desktop folder says, my old bullshit. | ||
| And you can either open it up and go right back into these predetermined patterns of behavior once the psychedelic experience has faded. | ||
| Because it'll be more comfortable that way than sort of reassessing the way you've been living your life. | ||
| Or, you know, you can hit delete and try to keep going and do DMT again. | ||
|
unidentified
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Try to get right back there, right when it stops being fresh. | |
| Just reintroduce that mind. | ||
| Oh, there it is. | ||
| Okay, I got it. | ||
| Okay, thanks. | ||
| There's an evolutionary toehold that you can shine a light toward your future that you're headed toward rather than depend on the effects of past behavior. | ||
| You know what's been really tripping me out is how many people that I know that are starting to have semi, at least, psychedelic experiences from doing yoga. | ||
| I've had maybe one time in my life where I did yoga and I felt like I was high. | ||
| I felt like I was high on marijuana. | ||
| That's what it felt like. | ||
| At the end of it, it was like, wow. | ||
| Whatever it is, that switch that you can hit when you do the right poses for the right amount of time, with the right amount of energy, there's a weird switch that you hit at the end where I was literally high. | ||
| But that's as far as I've ever taken it. | ||
| I've never had a hallucination or I've never astrally projected. | ||
| But I have heard some of the fucking craziest things from people that practice kundalini yoga, that if I didn't know them really well, and the way they were telling it to me is so matter-of-factly, I would say, this guy's crazy. | ||
| He's just making up a bunch of shit. | ||
| Except for the one time that I got myself high. | ||
| Because I was really high. | ||
| I mean, I was high. | ||
| I felt great. | ||
| I had love in my heart. | ||
| I wanted to hug people. | ||
| I felt like colors were brighter, sounds were cleaner. | ||
| I really felt really high. | ||
| And it was just from doing yoga. | ||
| And I was like, if that's possible, I've never really continually practiced Kundalini, but the people who really get into pranayamas and all that, they say that there's a wavelength that you can hit where you tap into that whatever it is, the pineal gland, whatever it is, the DMT factory, and you just boom! | ||
| Open up the doorway and punch right through. | ||
| And that you can do it through yoga. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Have you done it through yoga? | ||
| Yes, and there are different kinds of like the idea for Entheon. | ||
| The idea for Entheon really came about first of all through Allison and I had a routine of yoga and then meditation and during that period basically Instead of, like, kind of forcing myself to imagine something, I was saying, well, God, what do you want? | ||
| You know, what would you like me to put on there? | ||
| And so it showed this, the interconnected kind of Godhead type thing. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| God's on it. | ||
| Okay, just do something like that. | ||
| Yeah, come on. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| So, you know, that's on the natch, I guess. | ||
| You're not on the natch ever, dude. | ||
| Let's be honest. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're so psychedelic anyway from point A. You're naturally psychedelic. | ||
| And then on top of that, all the things you've done, how could you ever pretend that you're ever on the natch? | ||
| You've experienced too much to be on the natch. | ||
| Well, your reference point is now more cosmic than sort of isolated. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you feel more connected with people because – and it must happen to you – You have a community. | ||
| You have met with many of the people that come out to see you over your tour and things like that. | ||
| How has your sense of community evolved in your understanding? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Well, what I've found is that by doing something like a podcast, having conversations with people like you and my friends that come on, you're putting out the kind of conversations that we're having right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
now. | |
| You're putting these out to people that live in places where they don't know anybody like you. | ||
| They can't get a guy like you to sit down for three hours. | ||
| I couldn't get you to sit down for three hours and just talk like this unless we're going to do a podcast. | ||
| I mean, we probably could, but this is the way to do it, you know, so everybody can be in on it as well. | ||
| But that's one of the best things for me about this podcast is that I'm getting to talk to like these people like Chris Ryan or Daniele Bolelli or all these interesting people that I get to talk to on a To me, that's a beautiful little situation that I've stumbled into. | ||
| And for me, I feel very fortunate just to be able to have all these conversations with people. | ||
| Now there's a sense of obligation because I know that people enjoy these conversations and I don't want to ever have them think that I'm not going to do it anymore. | ||
| We're going to keep this going like it's fun. | ||
| I know you enjoy it. | ||
| I enjoy it too. | ||
| It's totally mutual. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| I'm glad you like it. | ||
| And I think with that... | ||
| It's with that attitude. | ||
| We've created this group of people that listen to the podcast and maybe they've never had really introspective conversations with people. | ||
| Maybe they've never really thought about Living in another part of the world or maybe they've never thought about expanding the life that they live outside of this one realm of consciousness that they've inhabited their whole life, one way of looking at the world, whether it's racist or gluttonous or whether they've just been abusing their body or whether they've just been lazy about getting things done. | ||
| And when you hear a podcast Where you get a chance to see all these different people's takes on things. | ||
| From Everlast, the singer, to my friend Joey Diaz. | ||
| And all these different people's takes on things. | ||
| They're all different and dynamic. | ||
| And having access to that is like having a bunch of really smart friends around you all the time. | ||
| So if you can listen to these podcasts... | ||
| Not everybody's really smart. | ||
| I'm not saying we're all really smart. | ||
| I'm saying some of them are really smart. | ||
| But you get a chance to have these interesting conversations and they enrich people's consciousness. | ||
| Because you might be stuck in a bad spot. | ||
| I've been in a bad spot in my life where I didn't have a lot of cool people to talk to. | ||
| You couldn't just tune into a podcast. | ||
| And so my sense of community is sort of... | ||
| It's one, become a thing of obligation, a happy obligation. | ||
| But I definitely think we're obligated to continue to provide content. | ||
| I remember being addicted to radio shows or different bands when I was a kid. | ||
| You want more stuff. | ||
| You want constantly more stuff. | ||
| So that's a big part of community with me. | ||
| But it's also... | ||
| One of the happiest things that I've gotten from this podcast is people coming up to me telling me that it changed the way they think about things. | ||
| Telling me that now they're happy. | ||
| Telling me that now they eat healthy. | ||
| Telling me that now they just stopped being an asshole to people. | ||
| They realized they were really just frustrated and they needed to get their shit together. | ||
| It's over and over and over again. | ||
| And that sense of community, I mean, it was completely accidental. | ||
| We didn't set out to try to create some sort of a group that sort of tunes in. | ||
| We just hope people enjoy the podcast. | ||
| We didn't think it was going to be... | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's a very interesting thing. | ||
| When do a group of supportive listeners become a community? | ||
| And it's kind of like we see that today people would like to gather in a lot of different places and to coalesce for a few hours and have a temporary community. | ||
| Well, I think we'd like to have a full community, but we don't trust people to not get fucking kooky. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like, not everybody has their shit together. | ||
| No, you can't just walk into my house. | ||
| You might be nuts and tired. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And by the way, I'm tired. | ||
| I just got home from work. | ||
| I'd really like to just watch TV. I don't want you coming over my house. | ||
| So there's a certain boundary that we all have to set up. | ||
| That's why the church model of the, you know, there's a time when you devote some time to this other thing, too, that's going on that's more of a community thing. | ||
| That's why I ask about it, because it's something that we've been thinking about a lot. | ||
| It's going to happen on its own. | ||
| People are going to gravitate. | ||
| I told you, all the fringe people from all over the planet are coming to you, my friend. | ||
| They're going to zoom in on you, along with some cops, probably. | ||
| You're going to get some undercover cops that are going to try to pretend to be your friends and try to get deep into the organization and find out you're for real. | ||
| And then eventually they'll admit it to you. | ||
| You'll give them some acid. | ||
| They'll tell you they're a cop. | ||
| They'll apologize. | ||
| You'll say it's okay. | ||
| We don't give anything to anyone or really advocate that much. | ||
| We do tell the truth about what happened to us. | ||
| And I'm of the belief that the The discovery of LSD 70 years ago this year is quite a miraculous occurrence and probably of a religious importance to humanity in the great scheme of things. | ||
| And I think 70 years after the crucifixion, basically, it wasn't going so well for the Christians, you know. | ||
| And so there's a time, you know, and that's why I was trying to think of, oh, this is kind of like a civil rights issue that is pointing toward a higher freedom of consciousness and special places. | ||
| I'm not saying these are not... | ||
| Potentially dangerous substances and in the wrong hands at the wrong time and things like that can be a terrible weapon even. | ||
| So they're definitely things that shouldn't be toyed with and some people should stay very clear of them. | ||
| They happen to be something that gave us tremendous insight and I think many other people as well, not because I said so, but because people naturally have It's just a weird thing that we have once we write things down on paper. | ||
| We say, this is a law. | ||
| Even when it gets to the overwhelming breaking point, and it's probably not there with psychedelics. | ||
| I think it is with pot. | ||
| When it gets to the undeniable breaking point where people just – they're like, no, like 70 percent can say they favor legalization. | ||
| Like, sorry. | ||
| It's just – it's not up for grabs. | ||
| The federal government is not really interested in what you're really – oh, 70 percent? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Call us when it's a million percent and we'll still tell you to fuck yourself. | ||
| It's like they just – The laws don't make any sense, and it only points at this time to suppression. | ||
| It's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| They're non-lethal. | ||
| They're non-lethal, life-changing, and there's a lot of people that give it five stars on Yelp. | ||
| Some people have had some bad times on Mushrooms, that's a fact, but if Mushrooms had a Yelp page, it would be a motherfucker. | ||
| That shit would be filled with stars, and there would be a link to... | ||
| Every one of those reviews would say more at the bottom. | ||
| You'd have to click to get an extra paragraph or two. | ||
| How many infinite stars are there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It would be, yeah. | ||
| If you had less than five stars for mushrooms, you're an asshole. | ||
| Give it five stars, stupid. | ||
| It was the best thing that ever happened to you. | ||
| I mean, Johns Hopkins University is now starting a public study saying that just one mushroom trip 20 years ago has a profound effect on personality and improved people's outlook and their level of happiness. | ||
| It can make people happier. | ||
| That sounds so stupid that it's illegal. | ||
| How many people are like you? | ||
| How many people are like, well, I just needed that reset, and with a loving person that I meet, I have a great time, and then all of a sudden, boom, I'm off to the races on a totally different track. | ||
| How many people have to say that before... | ||
| We, as a culture, go, well, this Alex Gray is way cooler. | ||
| He's a way better version. | ||
| Look, he makes amazing art. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| He's happy. | ||
| He seems fulfilled. | ||
| He's trying to create a center, a beautiful building where people can come and worship all this stuff. | ||
| What is wrong with that? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| What are we trying to protect people from? | ||
| It sounds like you're trying to protect people from enlightenment. | ||
| That would sound preposterous. | ||
| What kind of a benevolent leader would you be if you're trying to protect people from potential enlightenment? | ||
| Or are you scared of potential enlightenment yourself? | ||
| And knowing that if you do take mushrooms, you can't put on the bulletproof vest and tear gas the kids. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You're not going to do it. | ||
| You're not going to be the pepper spray cop when the kids are protesting because they're not going to be able to afford... | ||
|
unidentified
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You have a conscience. | |
| Yes. | ||
| You have a conscience and you want to do... | ||
| You can't do that gig anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got to get a new gig. | ||
| Well, if you do do it, you'll have nightmares. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Imagine doing mushrooms and then pepper spraying kids. | ||
| Oh my god, the demonic nightmares that you would have for decades. | ||
| And then the habits that you'd form to avoid confronting them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| You'd become a fucking gambling addict for sure. | ||
| Three cigarettes in your mouth at the same time. | ||
| Looking to bet on a roach crossing a parking lot. | ||
| You bet on anything. | ||
| Whatever to distract yourself from. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that just got started off in a bad way. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And very few things can help them. | ||
| Except psychedelic experiences. | ||
| They're one of the best ways to affect those. | ||
| And like we said, it doesn't have to be a drug. | ||
| You can get psychedelic experiences through meditation. | ||
| If you've practiced it enough, allegedly, he says he's done it. | ||
| I've never got there other than getting high. | ||
| Like you're saying, doing yoga and then meditation, even not for a long time. | ||
| There are many different approaches to meditation, from the simplest kind of watching your breath to a kind of, Alison talks about an aesthetic kind of reception of considering each moment for the beautiful, special, unique I think that it is. | ||
| Like we listen to music. | ||
| You know, we listen with an ear of appreciation and things like that. | ||
| If we had an aesthetic scrutiny and could see the beauty of Of our cosmic situation, you know, that we evolved to this point where we can talk to each other through a network of intelligence and light and share potential connection, community, even of a new wave of consciousness that's spread throughout the world. | ||
| I feel like these podcasts and things like that are the mushroom fruit Of a mycelial body of underground intelligences that interweave and then they pop out on these special occasions. | ||
| It's a door to open people up to people like you, to new possibilities, new ways of thinking. | ||
| And sometimes that's all you need is just one unique idea that's put in your head by someone that you don't even know. | ||
| Just listening to them talk to somebody else And that thought sends you off in a different direction. | ||
| A person's words can be psychedelic. | ||
| There's a lot of different things. | ||
| Childbirth can be psychedelic. | ||
| There's a lot of different things that happen to you in this life. | ||
| We think of psychedelics as being hallucinations, and we think of them as being sort of child's fair. | ||
| But the reality is that there's a lot that comes out of them that It's very difficult to get any other way. | ||
| And the way it comes out so reliably, it's like no one... | ||
| Like, mushrooms work for almost everyone on the planet. | ||
| Like, no one's immune. | ||
| Like, you could be out of focus and not really get there with Kundalini. | ||
| You really just can never really get your shit and groove, and you just have a bad class. | ||
| You take five grams of mushrooms, you're off to the moon no matter if you like it or not. | ||
| You're gonna get sucked into the wake, and hopefully you can let go, ride it out, and be okay. | ||
| But you might just clench up, and it might just go haywire. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's why you're always choosing a supportive and safe setting, if possible, and under ideal conditions, even those that you don't have to worry about anything about it, that you can relax totally and that you're supported by loving friends, so that you feel that you can go as deep and as high as possible. | ||
| And with those conditions and your favorite music, we like to use a kind of spiritually uplifting Bach and stuff like that. | ||
| Kind of heavy for some people, but I love that stuff. | ||
| I thought you were going to say Christian rock. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But I like, you know, like we used to listen to musical offering all the time and it's so eerie, but it favored the tripping mind with all the fugues and things like that. | ||
| The infinitizing is really there in Bach. | ||
| I forgot to tweet people and tell them that we're live. | ||
| Ah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucked up. | |
| Start ever? | ||
| No, we don't have to start ever. | ||
| We've been live for a while. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Live for a while with... | |
| Me too. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Sorry, folks listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's good. | |
| So do you ever go back to Columbus, Ohio? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I actually... | |
| All my friends went to CCAD, and that's actually the college I was actually supposed to go to, but I ended up not going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Do you ever go back? | ||
| Do you ever visit? | ||
| I mean, I bet you're like a superhero there now. | ||
| Well, I think the great return home has not really happened so much. | ||
| But I do visit my mother and family and things there. | ||
| The heartland, baby. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we'll see. | ||
| You know, there's some festival things that are happening in the region. | ||
| And this year we're going perhaps... | ||
| To another part of the world, but then at some point, I think we'll coordinate. | ||
| Now what part of the Hudson Valley, is it the Hudson Valley that you're putting this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Where is it at? | ||
| We're in the town of Wappinger, and Wappinger is a beautiful town that's right on the Hudson River, and it's related to Wappingers Falls. | ||
| And Wappinger is the name of the native people who inhabited the region 400 years ago. | ||
| And they were a wonderful kind of series of tribes that went all the way down. | ||
| How do you spell Wappinger? | ||
| W-A-P-P-I-N-G-E-R. That's a cool name. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's got resonances with many creatures and with a kind of good attitude. | ||
| They had an awesome idea about the Hudson River. | ||
| We call it the Hudson now. | ||
| It used to be the Mohicanitok, the great flow that goes both ways. | ||
| And that makes sense. | ||
| It's a tidal river, and it goes up right to our town, right to around there, and then it goes back to the ocean. | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| What kind of town is this in? | ||
| Well, it's been many things, and it's right now. | ||
| Now I'd say it's an evolving town. | ||
| And the place that we inhabit, it used to be called Deer Hill. | ||
| And Deer Hill was a United Church of Christ congregation and also an interfaith kind of camp. | ||
| So they had a very trans-denominational or interfaith kind of approach to spirituality. | ||
| And they had it on the market for like seven years and finally when we found each other we felt like we had a lot in common. | ||
| That our message was an attempt at a universal message of spirituality and interconnectedness and using nature as a setting for this kind of soul renewing kind of surrounding in a creative environment. | ||
| So we do all kinds of creativity classes there from dancing and movement and yoga and meditation and things like that. | ||
| So how much of the place is done? | ||
| The inside is done, it's just the outside needs to be completed with the artwork? | ||
| With Entheon, what we have is an old carriage house. | ||
| And it's been structurally reinforced and we've actually put quite a bit into it already in sealing and shoring it up. | ||
| But then we have to take the roof off and we have to establish new steel foundations in all the corners. | ||
| And we're building the heads 16 feet away from the entry to the brick building. | ||
| So what you'll have is a large atrium in front of the brick building when you walk into Entheon. | ||
| And with this, there will be the reception, there will be the bathroom and coat closet and things like that, but there will also be a fountainhead there that will mount against the wall of this old carriage house. | ||
| So you'll see this dramatic kind of 75 by 23 foot high wall of brick. | ||
| Is this it right here? | ||
| We're looking at it right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's up here as well. | ||
| Pull it all the way back, Brian, for a second? | ||
| The construction looks, like, pretty in-depth. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, you guys did a lot of stuff to the place. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's been... | ||
| And are you living inside that as well? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| We are not. | ||
| There's the brick carriage house. | ||
| And so we're going to... | ||
| We've been shoring it up. | ||
| We found nearby construction companies that are specialists in ornamental casting of concrete. | ||
| And so this has led to this kind of key to how we're going to actually build the building. | ||
| So that's all going to be concrete, those faces? | ||
| Yes, but it's a skin, a thin skin of concrete about an inch thick and reinforced with steel and a glass fiber reinforced kind of concrete. | ||
| It's a very special kind of permanent and then it's going to be sectioned. | ||
| And like these heads, there's very repetitive kinds of elements to it. | ||
| So they'll be made on some sort of a gigantic mold or something like that? | ||
| And there'll be several of them? | ||
| First, it'll be... | ||
| First, it was, I guess, seen in the imagination. | ||
| Thank you, transcendent visionary source. | ||
| And then I drew it. | ||
| And then I showed it to Ryan Tottle, who's an amazing digital sculptor and visionary artist. | ||
| And he works at Disney, actually, during the day. | ||
| And so he took this into three dimensions and made the actual 3D model that's sized perfectly to the building. | ||
| So this will be printed out in sections and will have basically a foam printout That then will be corrected and things like that and then a mold will be taken from that. | ||
| Then in that mold we shoot this concrete, thin, kind of inch thick stuff. | ||
| It's got pins on the back that attach to a steel armature and that armature attaches to the building. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| It's very exciting because it's a real and actual thing. | ||
| It's incredibly ambitious. | ||
| Well, look. | ||
| People always did sacred buildings and it's up to … You don't have to justify it to me. | ||
| I think it's awesome. | ||
| I mean you're like, hey, they've always Well, I mean, this is tiny, tiny little expression compared to magnificent temples that are all over the world and things, you know. | ||
| I mean, they're grand and huge. | ||
| Well, there's no Pope behind you with horse carriages filled with gold to pay for the construction. | ||
| But there's people who are pledging 10 bucks and 30 bucks and 50 bucks. | ||
| And I should tell them that they get something from that. | ||
| You have a bunch of different tiers set up of different things that you get, whether it's artwork or How many different levels do you have of possibilities? | ||
| Oh, we have so many. | ||
| We've got like even original artwork that has never been offered before and stuff. | ||
| So there's a PDF with all kinds of artworks and things like that and sketches. | ||
| That's really cool. | ||
| These are worth admission for two to Entheon. | ||
| That's your coin? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have your own money. | ||
| Jesus, man. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| You're going too far. | ||
| I need you to take it down a notch. | ||
| Whatever you do, nobody has guns, okay? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No guns ever, right? | ||
| You should really make that super strict. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you're going to have a bunch of loons that go, you know what? | ||
| I love you. | ||
| I love psychedelics, but I also love the Second Amendment. | ||
| We're here to rock. | ||
| When it comes, it takes our compound. | ||
| Well, we try to have... | ||
| You know, intelligence, security, just so that things always stay cool. | ||
| You know what it would be, though? | ||
| It would be the cop that pretended to be one of you guys that would freak out and pull his gun so that the real cops could come in and lock you guys down because you were violent and you had guns. | ||
| That would be what I would do if I was a cop and I was trying to shut you hippies down. | ||
| Well, we actually have made friends with the local police because we're grateful for their service. | ||
| That's a beautiful thing to say, too. | ||
| I agree with that as well. | ||
| I get shit about that online because I always tell people that I like cops. | ||
| But I think it's important to have police officers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We do. | |
| We absolutely depend on them as a community. | ||
| And there's a lot of good ones, you know, and the people don't want to address that. | ||
| There's a lot of cops out there that are nice, despite all the shit they see every day. | ||
| We have friends who are sort of high up in that in the local region, and they're just some of the nicest people and most compassionate, actually, because they're They go to people who are in trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mostly. | ||
| And then, you know, they're absolutely bad cops. | ||
| That's no doubt about it either. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That happens too. | ||
| No one's making up for that. | ||
| We're just saying there's a need for it and a lot of them are good. | ||
| And if you're in a community that's accepting you guys and Did you have a little weird thing where they didn't want you guys to be non-taxed? | ||
| Well, we're still working that out. | ||
| They don't want to accept you as a regular religion. | ||
| Well, the church status is a... | ||
| You see, we're building sacred space. | ||
| We hold full moon ceremonies every month. | ||
| We hold our church. | ||
| That sounds awesome. | ||
| I wish I was your neighbor. | ||
| And we have neighbors who love to come over and they love to participate. | ||
| And we have people from all over the world who come. | ||
| And also, this is before Entheon really is there. | ||
| So there's a lot of four years we've been waiting. | ||
| And so now we've got a loan from a bank that is helping us out. | ||
| And we have the Kickstarter is coming. | ||
| You know, we still have like nine days or something like that. | ||
| Well, we'll try to pump it up for you. | ||
| What kind of town is this? | ||
| Is this like a town that accepts hippies? | ||
| Are they conservative? | ||
| No, I wouldn't say that. | ||
| I'd say there's a healthy mix. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Really astonishing is the religious diversity. | ||
| There's a Sikh temple, I believe. | ||
| There's Hindu temples. | ||
| There's a Tibetan Buddhist stupa. | ||
| All in your town? | ||
| All in the town. | ||
| How many people are in this town? | ||
| It's not a large amount. | ||
| Is it one of those vortexes? | ||
| A little. | ||
| Draws? | ||
| Like the Comedy Store? | ||
| I think it's a little bit of a vortex of beauty. | ||
| According to our Native American scholar, Evan Pritchard, he said that our land may have been held sacred by the Wappinger people as well. | ||
| So it's always been kind of in this... | ||
| You know, sacred tradition. | ||
| And it was a church before you. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| I always wondered how you would pick a site for something like this. | ||
| You know, I think it's really cool that you're doing it. | ||
| I think it's really fun. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| I know you have good intentions. | ||
| Yeah, we're hopeful. | ||
| And we met some of the neighbors, and we tried to be considerate now about sound and things like that. | ||
| And so it's... | ||
| How close are you to the neighbors? | ||
| You're 40 acres. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What kind of sounds are you guys making, you freaks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moans. | |
| What are you doing? | ||
| Imagine if Alex Gray was actually just a gun nut. | ||
| He's out there shooting. | ||
| This is all an act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that one of your things. | |
| It's music, you know, like sacred music. | ||
| We had a recent outdoor concert, but there was also a fireworks display by the city that By the town that night. | ||
| Oh, so it was perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of your things on your Kickstarter is awesome. | |
| There's only five left, though. | ||
| But for $1,500, you get a hand-drawn portrait of you or your beloved one. | ||
| How awesome is that? | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I almost want to do that. | |
| That's amazing. | ||
| Wow, that's so cool. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good Kickstarter, man. | ||
| You'll get some people, definitely, from this show. | ||
| And they get to it one more time. | ||
| I feel like we're PBS, so I'm going to say this one more time. | ||
| You know those gross fucking PBS shows where every 15 minutes they would chime in and try to get you to donate? | ||
| Like, why don't you guys just get some commercials so you don't have to do this? | ||
| This is disgusting. | ||
| Stop interrupting the conversation, you freaks. | ||
| So do you feel like you're already starting to have a gravity in this town? | ||
| People are already starting to be drawn towards this thing that you're creating and putting together with all these ceremonies? | ||
| Well, we did have a recent event this past week. | ||
| Is that what the cops called it? | ||
| Well, there was a recent event at the Entheon. | ||
| This new religion just moved in. | ||
| That's how they would describe a bunch of arrests. | ||
| Well, here in LA, we actually had a safe event where Ott played and Ken Jordan from Crystal Method. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ott? | |
| Who's Ott? | ||
| OTT. He's... | ||
| An amazing, kind of named after Jonathan Ott, but Ott in terms of... | ||
| I'm not familiar. | ||
| Who's Jonathan Ott? | ||
| Jonathan Ott is a translator of Albert Hoffman's and also was one of the people who came up with the term entheogen. | ||
| With Dr. Hoffman. | ||
| A translator? | ||
| A scientific translator? | ||
| An author. | ||
| You said he was a translator of Hoffman's? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What do you mean by a translator? | ||
| Well, when my problem child wanted to come out in English, Albert Hoffman wanted someone who was responsible to his word and to his meaning would translate his words for him. | ||
| I'm so ignorant I wasn't aware that Albert Hoffman didn't speak English. | ||
| Yeah, no, he was Swiss. | ||
| I figured if he's figuring out how to make shit, he's got to be American. | ||
| I mean, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| He spoke pretty good English. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| But not to translate the book. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's fascinating stuff, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Ott played and Jonathan Singer, who's a – I call him a light slinger and VJ Extraordinaire. | ||
| had made a printout of the Entheon kind of altar DJ booth or I guess electronic musician station and so these wonderful musicians played behind something, a console that looked a lot like the Entheon thing. | ||
| So it printed it out and Ryan had made this model for the booth And it was like a proof of concept of this is how we're going to print out the building. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it looks really cool. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You're doing raves. | ||
| You've got DJs up there. | ||
| This is the best religion of all time. | ||
| Everybody's ecstatic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got it. | |
| Visionary. | ||
| Yeah, that's a beautiful thing, man. | ||
| And you're going to have a positive effect on a lot of people who come through those doors. | ||
| That's everything you would ever want out of a religion, a center where people can meet, a community, and the ability to push something positive out those doors. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Well, it's really about inspiring the creative spirit in everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's ultimately why it's there. | ||
| We also see that in a dozen years or 2020, if possible, if we're able to sort of pay back some of our loans and various things over time, we look to build the actual chapel of sacred mirrors in the meadow, if possible. | ||
| And that if we're able to do that, that we would move our art out of the Entheon and have it as a sanctuary for visionary art from artists from around the world, many of whom have already come and done presentations there, and actually some of them are in the collection already and stuff. | ||
| So it will be an active center for the promotion of this I think you need your own podcast. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| A great way to reach people. | ||
| Super easy to do. | ||
| Set it up. | ||
| Go to Libsyn. | ||
| Get an account. | ||
| Not hard. | ||
| Really easy to do. | ||
| And you could give people just weekly updates on where everything stands. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| And I'm sure a lot of people would get into that. | ||
| And you could also have your thoughts on current events or your thoughts on whatever, anything. | ||
| You don't have to be married to any particular amount of time. | ||
| Do it for ten minutes if you like. | ||
| Do a quick one just to keep everybody posted. | ||
| Or do three hours. | ||
| Do whatever the hell you want. | ||
| But having something like that, when you're doing something like this, which is very... | ||
| You're creating this center for community. | ||
| You're creating this center for sort of the distribution of psychedelic ideas. | ||
| And in doing something like that, And creating that kind of a community. | ||
| You're really putting something out there into the world. | ||
| You're setting forth a beacon. | ||
| There's going to be so many people that are influenced by that. | ||
| There's so many people that look at that and go, what is he doing? | ||
| What's going on over there? | ||
| And they've got full moons. | ||
| What is the big deal about full moons? | ||
| What are these people doing? | ||
| Wow, that's pretty. | ||
| What is this fucking building? | ||
| And then they get sucked in. | ||
| Do you know you're doing that? | ||
| Are you going to be comfortable as a cult leader or how's that? | ||
| That's... | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| It's very tricky. | ||
| It's about, as I said, holding up a sacred mirror for people. | ||
| And if there's an element of inspiration for their own creative lives, whatever it is, then we can see that that's a spirituality that works for you, because you have a creative life that has meaning for you. | ||
| So you're seeking to inspire other people to be more creative as well. | ||
| You're seeking to start the spark. | ||
| It's about transformation of the consciousness so that we can regard nature as a sacred ally. | ||
| That we need to learn from and to stop abusing and that we can save what we can of the life web and have a humanity that lives for hundreds of thousands of years instead of snuffs itself out in a stupid Oops, I wrecked the planet. | ||
| I'm just a teenager. | ||
| What do you expect? | ||
| Can we grow up? | ||
| Can we mature as a species? | ||
| I think it's the most exciting and amazing time because it's like our Kickstarter. | ||
| I have a kind of a, wow, boy, there's some gravity in the timeline element. | ||
| Of course, We haven't got a united world where we say collectively, oh, you know what? | ||
| That is too much carbon. | ||
| Let's do the solar really hard and so we can start to turn it around. | ||
| We're not there yet. | ||
| But people in general, I think, feel that and they start to feel like the, oh, Wow, how can we turn it around? | ||
| That's why I think that people like Paul Stamets and other visionary thinkers who understand more about the intricacies and intelligence of Say the fungus, that we have a lot to be hopeful about. | ||
| And if we put to use the technology and the intelligence that is already available. | ||
| You need to start a farm too. | ||
| You need to grow your own food out there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| You got 40 acres, right? | ||
| It's a great area. | ||
| I'm sure it gets a lot of rain. | ||
| Well, we're right next door to Great Field and perhaps an organic farm coming in. | ||
| So right now we're focusing on the temple, but all those things are part of the, I think, overall permaculture plan. | ||
| We're still mapping the land to see permaculturally what would make sense to develop. | ||
| That's going to be really fascinating when it's done, man. | ||
| I really can't wait. | ||
| And I'm really excited about it. | ||
| But this goes to show you the negative thinking that some people just can't escape. | ||
| Some people just can't help being negative. | ||
| No matter what, no matter how positive someone else's message is, some people can't help being negative. | ||
| Somebody talked about your Entheon. | ||
| They said it was a shrine to your ego. | ||
| Because you're creating a big piece of art, a big piece of beautiful art, then that's somehow a shrine to your ego. | ||
| Isn't that a strange thing that people will accept art, but if that art becomes a building, then something's ego about it. | ||
| It can be the most beautiful thing, as long as it's a painting or a sculpture, but when you make a house out of it, Then it's a shrine. | ||
| It's a shrine to your ego. | ||
| It can't just be a beautiful piece of art. | ||
| A sculpture. | ||
| Why does someone have to hate like that? | ||
| That's got to be the way you were raised. | ||
| It's got to be the people that you're around. | ||
| There's no other way that kind of douchey thinking should be acceptable. | ||
| Hey, look, everybody's entitled to their reaction, and I think that it's inevitable. | ||
| Yeah, but everybody's also entitled to be mocked for their reaction. | ||
| That's an important part of culture. | ||
| People need to feel the sting of other people going, Bitch, shut up. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| The guy's making a beautiful building. | ||
| What's your problem? | ||
| Shrine to his ego. | ||
| Negative. | ||
| A lot of people need hugs. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| A lot of people didn't get them. | ||
| A lot of people need them now. | ||
| Well, the very idea is the idea that there is basically one face of God, and it's all of us. | ||
| And so there's a multiple... | ||
| And then there's a one on the top of the roof. | ||
| So you got the one and the many and the many and the one. | ||
| And through consciousness evolution, you can reach both. | ||
| I like that you say that and it doesn't sound goofy at all. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, it's like the plain facts, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're sincere. | ||
| But it's one of those concepts where you start talking about the God is the one and the one is the Lord and people go, what is this crazy fuck going on about your wife? | ||
| But geez, okay, you take it from a scientific perspective. | ||
| Most are still on the Big Bang that 13.7 billion years ago there was nothing and then kablam, 13.7 billion years ago we're talking about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was a lot of evolution. | ||
| That's a lot of development over a long period of time. | ||
| And that's inherently the creative spirit brought us here. | ||
| And consciousness itself is a miracle. | ||
| That we could understand each other. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Beyond fascinating. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I love that you're optimistic, too. | ||
| Like, you have hope for the human race. | ||
| Like, I think there's no reason to be anything but. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Because despite all the crazy shit that's in the world, the million nuclear weapons that could destroy every single thing, we haven't done it yet. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of amazing. | ||
| It's kind of amazing that we've done as little pollution as we actually have. | ||
| I mean, that's really quite shocking that we actually... | ||
| Toned it down a little bit in Los Angeles. | ||
| There is some conscience there. | ||
| It was a little bit of like, hey, hey, everybody settle down. | ||
| You know, like, apparently the pollution was much worse in Los Angeles, like in the 60s and the 70s. | ||
| They said it was horrible because they had those lead cars. | ||
| The gas was totally different. | ||
| They cleaned that up a lot. | ||
| I mean, it still looks like shit. | ||
| It's still crazy brown air, but it's better brown air, Alex Gray. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| That's a symbol or a message of evolution. | ||
| A little bit of it, yeah. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| And the consciousness that was born during the 60s, the civil rights era, the feminism really came on strong, even eco-consciousness, all of these elements and gay rights. | ||
| The equality That element started to come to the surface, so a sense of conscience about accepting more diversity and living up to our idea about we the people, you know, and who are all the people. | ||
| And I think that the re-enfranchisement of people, like just by saying, okay, gay marriages, that's okay, you know, so then other nations say, okay, that's okay. | ||
| You know, so suddenly a stigma And a prohibition on a group of people has been lifted and they're re-enfranchised into the society, at no harm to the society, even benefit to it. | ||
| Likewise, the cannabis user eventually, I believe, should be reintegrated into society and the world. | ||
| This will show also an evolutionary step. | ||
| Because this is the recognition of the divinity of nature. | ||
| I think there's every reason to be optimistic and although there are some really bad things about the world today. | ||
| The financial system is crazy and corrupt. | ||
| It's too easy to manipulate and everybody knows it's rigged and we still have to use it and it's still the thing that pays off lobbyists and moves decisions that favor corporations instead of the general public. | ||
| We still know that there's a lot wrong with the world. | ||
| We're learning more about humans, about behavior, about just information itself, about technology, about our place in the universe. | ||
| We're learning more about the cosmos. | ||
| Every day there's like some new discovery, a new thing, a new this, a new that, and it's just coming at us like a wave. | ||
| Wave after wave of information. | ||
| I don't think it's possible to avoid all that. | ||
| Without some gigantic monstrous catastrophe, I think if you were looking at a graph and you look at the headspace of the average American person from 1960 and look at the headspace in 2013, you're dealing with a completely different Educated individual. | ||
| You're dealing with a level of understanding about the way the world works that's very different from at any other time. | ||
| Because almost any question that you've ever had can be answered on your phone within a matter of seconds. | ||
| And although that seems so normal, that changed the whole world. | ||
| And that's going on right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I think it snuck up on us so fast. | ||
| We just got so used to watching movies on our phone that we don't even think it's weird that it's just coming through the air into this little thin wafer thing that's made out of glass and metal in your pocket that you get to watch movies flying through the air. | ||
| And you don't even think about it. | ||
| It just seems so normal to you. | ||
| And it's all psychedelic. | ||
| It's very much so. | ||
| I guess Steve Jobs had to be interviewed by the Department of Defense and he had to defend his taking of psychedelics. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In order to get the highest clearance and things. | ||
| As part of his interview, he said that he still believed that it was one of the most important events in his life and his psychedelic experiences. | ||
| And many of the people that they worked with, of course, They wondered how many times they had tripped and things, and how far out are you? | ||
| And was part of the openness to new ways of thinking that it allowed. | ||
| Just as you were saying that after a psychedelic experience you have this folder that's called my old bullshit and then you have this possibility wide open in front of you. | ||
| My goodness, a full new possibility there. | ||
| You can jump back in the bag that you already know or you can forge ahead into a new territory. | ||
| And so that's the evolutionary edge. | ||
| And you're always pushing it. | ||
| And artists and creative people are always pushing it. | ||
| And that's why I say everybody's kind of pushing that edge in some way. | ||
| And is inherently that awareness. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's unavoidable. | ||
| And it's almost that biologically we can't keep up with all the technological evolution, although it's not the correct term to use, technological evolution. | ||
| They want to use it biologically. | ||
| But just that alone, it's almost like Our access to information is too great for our feeble minds to process. | ||
| We're still on some, you know, old school Pentium Celeron. | ||
| Remember those Celerons? | ||
| Weren't quite as good as the Pentium do? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're like on an old machine. | ||
| Our machine sucks. | ||
| We have Dunbar's number. | ||
| We can't remember more than 150 people. | ||
| We fuck up. | ||
| We can't remember phone numbers anymore because you don't have to remember them because they're on your phone. | ||
| You know, so in that sense, it's like we're almost becoming mush. | ||
| It's almost like... | ||
| What the technology is doing is setting us up. | ||
| It's getting us to a point where it's just overwhelming us with data that we can't help. | ||
| I know you're having a problem. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I'm going to help you out. | ||
| We're going to give you a chip. | ||
| We're going to put this chip in your brain. | ||
| And once you do, boom! | ||
| I mean, the government knows where you are at all times. | ||
| But... | ||
| You have instant 120 IQ. You're going to be able to see things you never saw before, memorize things fairly quickly. | ||
| It's a total brain upgrade. | ||
| It's a little chip with GPS in there, and there's a kill switch. | ||
| It's not a fucking electrocution bolt into your brain if you say anything bad about the government. | ||
| There's some movies being sort of made with that hypothesis, I think, and I always imagine the The interconnection of everyone being the ability to control the net and the vision. | ||
| Do you think at all about the technological singularity? | ||
| Do you follow Kurzweil and all that singularity stuff? | ||
| It is fascinating. | ||
| We have friends, Martine And Bina Rothblatt. | ||
| And Martine and Bina have been working on a robotic facsimile of Bina. | ||
| I'm interviewing her. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's wonderful. | ||
| Yeah, I'm interviewing her for my sci-fi show. | ||
| Fabulous. | ||
| Her lover recreated her. | ||
| Exactly, Martin. | ||
| Yeah, they're great. | ||
| They're wonderful people. | ||
| And we love them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're married. | |
| They have four children. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, that's amazing. | ||
| An artificial person. | ||
| As close to it as what we have right now, right? | ||
| Well, and... | ||
| So, I mean, they're where the rubber meets the road. | ||
| They're really trying to program the robotics so that we can have a closer facsimile. | ||
| Can you hang with that? | ||
| Can you go Blade Runner style? | ||
| Well, the thing that I found fascinating because I was very resistant to the whole idea. | ||
| Falling in love with the robot idea? | ||
| Well, just the idea that there will be a time when this will be a problem, you know, that you cannot distinguish between a human being and a robot. | ||
| That's coming, don't you think? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| I'm naïve to think that it isn't, but I have this feeling just like people have a gaydar or know who's Jewish and who's not and things like that. | ||
| That's pretty subtle and intangible things. | ||
| To say that all body armor and fact of your mechanicalness and inability to generate a subtle field even perhaps that's a heartbeat and things, these things are probably part of our unconscious Awareness of a human being. | ||
| So I'll see as this – as it develops, artificial intelligence and robotics and things, I'm sure they'll – part of it will evolve toward that. | ||
| I really feel like we're not giving technology the credit it deserves in that I think it might be alive. | ||
| And I know that sounds completely ridiculous because we're so sure that life is like us. | ||
| We're so sure that life has cells and has blood and it either consumes oxygen or it could be plant-based life. | ||
| But we know what life is and that's not life. | ||
| No, that's just something we created. | ||
| But no, because eventually when you turn it on, If it eventually gets to the point where it can reproduce on its own and think for itself and defends itself or knows how to stay alive or has instincts or knows how to repair itself, then what exactly is that? | ||
| How come it's not life-wide because it doesn't have what? | ||
| Is it enough skin? | ||
| If it's reproducing and thinking and altering its environment and then moving forward and creating new energy sources and figuring out how to better use resources, if it becomes intelligent life and some crazy asshole says and programs in, hey, defend yourself and reproduce as soon as you can, oh, you're doomed. | ||
| The human race is done. | ||
| For sure, that's a life form. | ||
| That's going to be a life form. | ||
| And it's going to get to the point, if this woman is recreating her wife, It's going to get to a point where that's going to be indistinguishable. | ||
| There's going to be an artificial you. | ||
| It might even be an artificial you that's exactly you. | ||
| It's your consciousness in another body. | ||
| You might be able to live several lives at once. | ||
| Just in case you fuck one of them up, you got a bunch of other good lives going on simultaneously. | ||
| Well, if you do the right Tibetan Buddhist practices, I think you can do that anyway. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The other element of the virtual heaven that I love that Martine and Bina have talked about and the TerraSem movement that they've been putting forward is that we can program as much of the information about our lives and about You know, | ||
| by filling out basically an elaborate questionnaire. | ||
| And this also records our voice, telling stories and things like that, and the way that we inflect and things. | ||
| So these modulations and things become part of what could be a virtual being. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a robot. | ||
| It can be, for the virtual heaven, just a facsimile, a 3D model, That's based on the sort of 3D mapping of the head and maybe the chest or something like that. | ||
| So you have a sense of the person and you might ask a virtual grandma or grandpa who passed on several decades ago But the great-grandkids can now access them via this virtual grandma that can say, Yes, when I was growing up, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You know, and share a story or something. | ||
| Now, what's wrong with that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be so weird. | |
| What's wrong with that? | ||
| There's something crazy about turning Grandma on. | ||
| Hey, Grandma, how's the great beyond? | ||
| Oh, so I was just knitting! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| There's something fucking creepy about that, man. | ||
| I mean, maybe we need to let things go. | ||
| Maybe we need to realize that, you know, Grandma is the past and whatever great memories we had of her. | ||
| So are you going to close her Facebook account? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Can you imagine if grandma's Facebook account becomes her? | ||
| Wow, that's what we're talking about. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| But it's kind of calm, right? | ||
| I mean, who the fuck saw Facebook a thousand years ago? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems to me that a Blade Runner type scenario is inevitable, though, where they have a life that... | ||
| Is artificial but acts so much like us that it itself doesn't even know it's artificial. | ||
| Because if you're going to program a robot correctly to be an artificial person that acts like a person, you don't tell them it's artificial. | ||
| You want them thinking they're real, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It would be the Blade Runner scenario. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a goddamn brilliant movie. | ||
| It was. | ||
| It was so amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What it might mirror is this whole thing about the Neanderthal and our early relationship. | ||
| As species, we, for thousands and thousands of years, cohabited the same areas. | ||
| And what kind of Neanderthal genocide happened there, you know? | ||
| Like, what was the shadow of our species, you know, built on this relationship? | ||
| Do you think they just naturally dart off? | ||
| Oh, no, I think we definitely killed them. | ||
| Have you ever seen the people, there's one guy, it's a really sketchy theory, but he painted Neanderthal as like a gorilla-faced predator. | ||
| And he tried to say that Neanderthal probably hunted man, and that's why we drove it to extinction. | ||
| And that we based our image of what Neanderthal looked like based on human skin. | ||
| But we don't really have any skin from Neanderthals. | ||
| We know that they were far stronger than people. | ||
| And we know that they had a much thicker bone structure. | ||
| They were smaller. | ||
| They'd be like five feet tall, but they would weigh 200 pounds. | ||
| They were really, really incredibly strong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stocky. | |
| Yeah, well, they were more built like... | ||
| Like orangutan. | ||
| Yeah, more like a lower primate than like a human or a homo sapien. | ||
| And so this guy... | ||
| See if you can pull that up, Brian. | ||
| It was pretty trippy. | ||
| It's mostly bullshit, but it's kind of fun bullshit. | ||
| This guy. | ||
| Fuck, what would you say? | ||
| Neanderthal predator. | ||
| Yeah, see if you find that. | ||
| And he had like a whole video where they mapped out, in his opinion, what it would look like in... | ||
| 3D imagery, and so we had this really scary looking chimpanzee thing with big giant eyes. | ||
| We don't have any eye tissue from the eonotals either, and they have a much larger eyeball than humans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, they're built fairly differently. | ||
| So this guy drew them up like crazy gorilla monsters. | ||
| I don't think it's right, but it's kind of cool to look at. | ||
| And it's interesting just to conceive of a... | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's how he drew it. | ||
| He drew it like they might have been hairy, but they were really muscular, and he made them look more chimpanzee-like than human-like. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he did a whole documentary on it, I think. | ||
| It's probably bullshit. | ||
| Well, you could genetically imagine yourself into a Sasquatch. | ||
| I was going to ask you about that. | ||
| I've been hunting for Sasquatch. | ||
| Not hunting like trying to hurt him. | ||
| I should say searching for Sasquatch. | ||
| I've been doing this TV show. | ||
| We went up to Washington State, and we stayed in the woods out near Mount Rainier. | ||
| And it's like tropical rain. | ||
| I mean, not tropical. | ||
| A rainforest up there. | ||
| A real rainforest. | ||
| Like, if you've never been up there, you've no idea what that's like. | ||
| It's the weirdest environment ever. | ||
| You park your car, you take a walk, you go 100 yards into the woods, and you might as well be on another planet. | ||
| You literally enter into a different dimension. | ||
| There's the dimension of... | ||
| There's a dimension of highways and houses, and that's all out there. | ||
| But once you go into a rainforest, you go a little bit in, and then you're engulfed by this new reality. | ||
| And this reality is you see an elk running past you, and they disappear in the trees because everything's so thick. | ||
| And people start to see Bigfoot. | ||
| They start seeing anything, man. | ||
| You don't know what the fuck is out there. | ||
| You think Bigfoot's preposterous until you go to a rainforest like the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| And you're walking around, and you're like, fuck, maybe, man. | ||
| Yeah, like what? | ||
| But if you look at the earliest kind of human-animal hybrid cave art, you have something that looks oddly like a Sasquatch-type thing, because it's just a marriage of the stag and the human, and so it's got characteristics of the animal and the human together. | ||
| They did a lot of that stuff really early on. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, look at all the Egyptian art. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| The fusion of the creature, the animal, the Therian morph. | ||
| It's called Therian morph? | ||
| That's a term for it. | ||
| Isn't that what those furries call themselves too? | ||
| They call themselves Therians? | ||
| Hmm, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| I think that that's probably a relationship. | ||
| Not that there's anything wrong with being a furry. | ||
| Much love to my mascot friends. | ||
| I'm right here, Joe. | ||
| I accidentally stumbled into a furry convention once in Pittsburgh. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's going to sound stupid, but I thought it was beautiful. | ||
| I thought it was beautiful that these people found a place where they could all get together and do this. | ||
| They like doing it. | ||
| They like doing it. | ||
| And if you do that in your neighborhood, people are going, what the fuck are you doing, man? | ||
| Why are you dressed up like a giant chipmunk? | ||
| But for whatever reason, I don't know why they like doing it, but... | ||
| It doesn't seem like they're hurting anybody. | ||
| And we were walking. | ||
| They seemed so happy. | ||
| We're walking down the street and all these furry dudes and gals were laughing and talking together, all with their crazy costumes on. | ||
| Nobody took their shit off. | ||
| And I was like, this is the weirdest thing ever. | ||
| But it looks so fun. | ||
| It's embodying a kind of Dr. Seuss-like zany truth about the world of creatures that we're... | ||
| And it's acknowledging that we're part of an almost interdimensional web of creatures. | ||
| And I think that the early stuff, the Egyptian and all the cave art and things like that, really did come out of a place of higher awareness, that that was the kind of Well, like a lot of psychedelic drugs have animal ideas embedded in them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Especially DMT or ayahuasca, there's the jaguars or leopards. | ||
| Jaguars, right? | ||
| Jaguars and snakes. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And those sort of things, it only kind of makes sense. | ||
| They're commonplace, absolutely. | ||
| And there could have been many different psychedelic compounds we don't even know about anymore that these people had found and that put them together with these ideas of combining animals and human into one form. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Well, it's an easy transfer. | ||
| And the thing that I found refreshing in the Egyptian temples and things was How easy it was to transpose a head and stuff of one creature and another onto a human body and how they were considered the gods. | ||
| Now, if your job is to sacralize the nature field, to give a sense of the place that we live in is a gift of a divine creator, then if your gods actually are different animals or they have animal characteristics, | ||
| you're more apt to treat the animal with some respect or As being an aspect of that divinity. | ||
| And so the translation of the archetypal symbol of a particular animal spirit and a divine human form is to acknowledge our oneness with that kind of the field of the animal spirits. | ||
| And it's a very shamanic Kind of thing to do. | ||
| And it was part of many of the Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, the Greek Sphinxes and things like that. | ||
| There's this fusion from the very earliest cave art all the way through the great religious kinds of things. | ||
| Angels have wings. | ||
| They're animal and human hybrids. | ||
| That's a really good point that I never even thought of until just now. | ||
| It's still part of the public imagination. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Angels are part bird. | ||
| I just thought they were people with wings. | ||
| But no, obviously not. | ||
| If they had a bird's head, then you'd be like, they're part bird. | ||
| But as long as they have a human's head, you're like, it's not even a bird, man. | ||
| It's an angel. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And we accept it so much because the idea of there being a higher world that we ascend to. | ||
| Symbolically, it's so transparent that we don't even notice it. | ||
| It's just like there. | ||
| And I think that that archetype is part of the human psyche and you can find it in each sacred path. | ||
| The bridging of the realms. | ||
| That's what Hermes was. | ||
| Hermes Trismegistus, the occult kind of foundation. | ||
| How about Ganesh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's just so many versions of the combining of a human and an animal and sacred religious artwork. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| Like the Hindu stuff where there's a man with a lion's head and people that are like octopus arms, six arms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, a bunch of people trying to make sense. | ||
| Of what they're experiencing. | ||
| Soma, or whatever it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What do you think Soma was? | ||
| Well, it's very interesting. | ||
| You know, I think Steve Hager thinks it's cannabis. | ||
| Most people are like, it's a sleeping pill, dummy. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| Like, Soma, the sleeping pill, they fucked up. | ||
| They should have never named it Soma. | ||
| Soma is like, it's a sacred psychedelic drug from, was it from? | ||
| The Rig Veda. | ||
| The Rig Veda. | ||
| 6,000 years ago, the earliest human drug. | ||
| You know, religious text is the songs in the Rig Veda, the Hindu text. | ||
| And some asshole came along and turned that into a sleeping pill. | ||
| A pharmaceutical sleeping pill. | ||
| What a bunch of dicks. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| I mean, that's like really rude. | ||
| You know, that's like Catholics would never take that. | ||
| If you had a sleeping pill that was called the sacrament, the Jesus sacrament, they'd be like, hey, fuckhead, you can't call it that. | ||
| But people are like, Soma, yeah, that's in another country, and we're America, and we're just going to call it Soma because we like the name. | ||
| Soma it is. | ||
| Okay, Soma. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the original Soma was supposed to be an amazing psychedelic, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it put the person who imbibed it into a state of connectedness with the divine. | ||
| And Soma was also recognized as the source of many things, including clothing and stuff like that. | ||
| As an artist, why do you think that you were the first person to really encapsulate the tryptamine experience? | ||
| Because all these other people that didn't have these amazing works of art The only people that came close to capturing the tryptamine experience to me were the ancient Egyptians. | ||
| There's a lot of ancient Egyptian stuff like just Tutankhamen's headdress and the gold. | ||
| That's very tryptamine-like. | ||
| And it's one of the only things in historical art to me that rings trippy. | ||
| There's something about it. | ||
| You can almost hear music, like some kind of tryptamine music when you're watching these hieroglyphs and you're seeing these images. | ||
| The symbols, even if you don't understand what they mean, when you're looking at these symbols run together, your mind starts to try to form patterns. | ||
| And you start to try to think the way these people were thinking and see these incredibly complex geometric shapes that they had turned into buildings. | ||
| Buildings like the temple in man. | ||
| This gigantic building where each segment represents different chakras and different energy points in the human body. | ||
| There's texts around each one explaining this part of the human body. | ||
| It's fucking insane. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We want to bring that... | ||
| idea to the land of Kazim and have been, you know, the idea of these, the Neturu, the family of gods in Egypt, has really made a strong imprint on me. | ||
| When we went over there, Alison and I have been back a couple of times. | ||
| What is it called again? | ||
| The Netaru is the family of gods that kind of opened up out of Newt, the night sky, who had an affair with Geb, the earth father. | ||
| So the Night Sky mother held five children in her womb and had to find a special time to release them. | ||
| But the one who was in there with his brothers and sisters decided he didn't want to stick around. | ||
| He was the dark kind of lord and his name was Set. | ||
| And he cut his way out of his mother. | ||
| And out tumbled the rest of the brothers and sisters including Thoth and Isis and Osiris and Nephthys, his sister. | ||
| So basically Isis and Osiris got together and they were the football hero and the cheerleader match made in heaven and all that. | ||
| And they were just like Celebrated and stuff, and Set was kind of barren, you know, and he was kind of, you know, just probably a little jealous of his brother, maybe. | ||
| And Nephthys wanted a child, and so, anyway, she fooled Osiris into an affair, perhaps Anubis, the dog-headed, The embalmer of the netherworlds was the result of that. | ||
| Well, of course, Set was extremely disturbed and decided that he was going to find a way to kill Osiris, which eventually happened and he cut him up and threw him all over the Nile. | ||
| And so Isis was extremely distraught and she went around finding or remembering parts of the dismembered god. | ||
| And each place where she found a hand or a foot or something like that, a temple was built. | ||
| And so you would go down the Nile and remember the god. | ||
| And that's the idea. | ||
| Now, I think that, of course, it's the goddess that's been lost, that's been dismembered, the Mother Earth. | ||
| And so the idea is to – we have different stations on the land where there will be a foot, there will be hand and different things like that. | ||
| They'll represent different elements of the dismembered mother. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so we go around to remember the mother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And to renew ourselves and to renew nature. | ||
| Trying to wrap your mind around Egyptian mythology and what they meant by that and the origin of that. | ||
| How it led them to the society that was able to create those insane structures. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| I haven't been. | ||
| The only really crazy place I've been to is Chichen Itza. | ||
| I went to Chichen Itza once and that was one of those things where you're walking around going, what are they doing? | ||
| How did they do this? | ||
| Why did they do this? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And no one lived here anymore? | ||
| They just all moved out? | ||
| They made this and then they left. | ||
| Somebody left behind this. | ||
| Yeah, and people return there. | ||
| You return there. | ||
| We return there. | ||
| But nobody lives there. | ||
| No. | ||
| It'd be funny if some dude said, this is my house now. | ||
| Put a door in one of the temples. | ||
| Sometimes there are caretakers for these sacred sites. | ||
| You heard what happened in Belize, right? | ||
| They just mowed down one of the ancient Mayan temples or pyramids that was there. | ||
| It's like a really, really old structure. | ||
| Oh, I didn't hear that. | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| They plowed it down because it was on private land just to use it for limestone. | ||
| Good grief. | ||
| Yeah, people are freaking out like, what the fuck did you do? | ||
| Well, you know, there's different feelings in the different societies about these things. | ||
| You know, the Taliban just destroyed a huge Buddhist sculpture which was a heritage type site that It had been there for thousands of years. | ||
| Probably the CIA pretending to be the Taliban. | ||
| Look what they did! | ||
| These fucks! | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| I didn't mean it. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| At least that was the story that got out. | ||
| And it was sad. | ||
| It's most likely true. | ||
| Religious ideology is what gets people to do almost every really fucking crazy thing. | ||
| It's either money or religious ideology. | ||
| Or ideology in general. | ||
| Negative ideology. | ||
| We were talking about the Boston bombings. | ||
| We were like, you can't do that without ideology. | ||
| Like, no one is able to do something like that without ideology because you have to have something that allows you to think that that's the correct thing to do. | ||
| An ideology of hate. | ||
| Yeah, and not all ideologies are bad, but you don't get really insane acts of faith like that without an ideology. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Insane acts of terrorism either. | ||
| Both things come from... | ||
| It's not always bad, but it's tricky. | ||
| It's tricky when you just automatically subscribe to the patterns that are in front of you. | ||
| We like to be in... | ||
| It's like getting to that my old bullshit thing on the desktop. | ||
| We feel really comfortable going down already tread paths. | ||
| Yes, it's really true. | ||
| And it's sad that the... | ||
| The more widespread understanding of jihad as a holy war within the Muslim community is that it's something that the ego wages. | ||
| We engage with our ego, basically. | ||
| That somehow the soul and the ego is always in a kind of holy war with each other, that we desire the one true spirit to win out and to have love save the day and all these things, to be a hero in life. | ||
| I think part of why we're called to life. | ||
| Well, the original term was supposed to be like a war against your own vices, right? | ||
| Your personal vices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| To become a better person. | ||
| And it's a struggle to become a better person. | ||
| In the same way that Israel means God-wrestler. | ||
| You know, we're struggling with this higher nature. | ||
| And without engaging it somehow, without struggling with it, and to be activated in our creative pursuit of it. | ||
| It's not real or tangible for us. | ||
| It has to become a real practice. | ||
| That's why I like any kind of art or creativity or any form of expression, because that's what we're made of. | ||
| We're made of creative energy. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we're here for. | ||
| Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| We're just creating little computer babies. | ||
| That's how computers get made. | ||
| People create them. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's a new form of intelligence that we're living amongst. | ||
| Are you going to download your consciousness into a computer when the time comes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll have to see what's available, you know. | |
| I love Martine's response because I was saying, whoa, hey, you know, I don't know about a soul and a robot and stuff like that, but she was saying like, Well, who's to say that a soul, if there were a disembodied spirit, wouldn't like hanging around a robot of itself for a while? | ||
| Or who's to say you're not going to create a zombie in the next dimension because a person is going to be born without a soul because you put it in somebody's fucking computer. | ||
| And so then all of a sudden the next dimension is like the dawn of the dead. | ||
| You've got a bunch of zombies running around. | ||
| That could happen. | ||
| Dammit! | ||
| Maybe that's the zombie apocalypse. | ||
| The zombie apocalypse is here now. | ||
| Yeah, when we're seeing The Walking Dead and this sort of thing, this zombie theme keeps returning over and over and over again. | ||
| That's a warning telling us not to download our consciousness to computers. | ||
| We already have. | ||
| You know, that's what Facebook is. | ||
| That's Myspace, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Our Tumblr, our Instagram, our Twitter, all of these things are a virtual existence. | ||
| And wiki and various things like this, they give people maybe a sense of solidity. | ||
| That's why it's weird to go to someone's Twitter page after they're dead. | ||
| Have you ever done that before? | ||
| No, but I'm… Or a Facebook page. | ||
| I have a friend, a really great guy, who expired, and every now and then I go to his Facebook page and I'll read his posts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you know, I keep reading his posts, I'm still getting a little bit of him, you know? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If you watch a video of him, you're getting a little bit of him, you know? | ||
| It's not new stuff. | ||
| I listened to Ray Manzarek today. | ||
| He died today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I listened to him. | ||
| He was like 72, right? | ||
| 72, yeah. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| The doors. | ||
| He was in the doors and he's 72. It's like, wait a minute. | ||
| Help form the doors. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| How old are we getting? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Well, there's something timeless within that. | ||
| Maybe he downloaded himself into a computer right before he kicked off. | ||
| I think into all of our consciousness. | ||
| And the computers are just the external storage devices. | ||
| What's really the cool thing is that we're connected with all of it, just consciousness-wise. | ||
| What do you think the next stage of consciousness is going to be? | ||
| Do you think it's going to be some sort of an ability to read each other's minds, to integrate with each other, to exchange information freely through the air, like a Wi-Fi signal? | ||
| What do you think it's going to be? | ||
| All of that. | ||
| All of that. | ||
| It's coming, right? | ||
| Can't stop it. | ||
| I think that it's an inevitable evolutionary development. | ||
|
unidentified
|
However, some of it's going to take training and some of it's going to take an orientation toward it and an opening up the ideas of a I have a completely uneducated faith in the fact that people far smarter than me are going to continue to do awesome work. | |
| I'm convinced that they're going to continue to come out of school and figure new things out. | ||
| Even though I'm not placing... | ||
| I'm like, wow, we're really coming up with some really fast computers. | ||
| I'm not coming up with shit. | ||
| But somewhere, I'm convinced they're going to continue to do awesome stuff. | ||
| So whoever you are out there, keep it up. | ||
| Congratulations and thanks. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you, Alex Gray. | ||
| Please go to alexgray.com and please participate in the Kickstarter. | ||
| It's your chance to be a part of something really cool. | ||
| Beautiful building that's going to have a beautiful cause. | ||
| It's going to have a beautiful movement behind it. | ||
| And you're already doing amazing things. | ||
| And I swear to God, if I lived up there, I'd be visiting you all the time. | ||
| Maybe when this shit hits the fan, I'll move to the Hudson Valley. | ||
| It's cool up there, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's cold in the winter, though, no? | ||
| Yeah, if you ever make it northeast, we'd love to spin you up. | ||
| How far is it from New York City? | ||
| It's a car drive about an hour and a half. | ||
| Oh, that's nothing. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| It's also Metro North. | ||
| You can take the, from Grand Central, you can walk from the station there. | ||
| I would love to come check it out. | ||
| And I absolutely want to come once it's all done, just to see how crazy it's going to be. | ||
| Oh, maybe you can help us kick it off. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, let's do some sort of a party or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But all you crazy hippies out there, keep it together. | ||
| Don't get too nutty at this party. | ||
| You know, Alex Gray took acid and changed him, so I'm going to take it all. | ||
| No, not at the parties. | ||
| Find a nice, peaceful place. | ||
| Find a nice spot in the woods. | ||
| Find a nice spot in the woods. | ||
| So it's alexgray.com. | ||
| And on Twitter, your Twitter is alexgraycosm, C-O-S-M. And so please follow him on Twitter, alexgraycosm. | ||
| Right now you've got 22,511. | ||
| Let's see if we can boost that shit up to 22,600. | ||
| I'm PBS again. | ||
| I went PBS again on you. | ||
| I apologize, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Please, but to support this, it's an awesome cause if you got the cash. | ||
| If you don't, you know, don't do it. | ||
| Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. | ||
| We really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks, everybody, who's been coming out to these shows and all the cool people that I met when I was looking for Bigfoot. | ||
| I had a great fucking time. | ||
| We'll be back on Thursday with the great Graham Hancock. | ||
| He'll be joining us. | ||
| Thanks to Ting for sponsoring our podcast. | ||
| Go to rogan.ting.com and save $25, you freak. | ||
| Thanks to Squarespace, squarespace.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| And if you want to use it, use the offer code JOE5. Thanks also to onnit.com. | ||
| Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN. Save some money. | ||
| Goddamn, I gotta record that shit because it sounds so repetitive. | ||
| I'm broken. | ||
| I can't say it anymore. | ||
| Alright, we love you guys and we'll see you on Thursday. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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