Alex Grey and Joe Rogan dive into psychedelics as humanity’s crucifixion-level revelation, with Johns Hopkins studies showing mushrooms can reshape personality. Grey’s Entheon project—a 40-acre Kickstarter-funded art sanctuary in Massachusetts—mirrors ancient temples like Egypt’s Neturu shrines or Chichen Itza, blending sacred mirrors and repetitive concrete heads to evoke unity and consciousness evolution. They debate digital afterlives, from Facebook’s ghostly archives to potential telepathic Wi-Fi signals, framing it as inevitable progress. Grey dismisses "ego shrine" criticism, while Rogan jokes about zombie apocalypses in virtual realms, teasing future tech like mind-reading or downloading souls. The episode ends with Rogan promoting Entheon and his next show: Graham Hancock’s ancient mysteries. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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Alex Gray is here, you dirty freaks.
So strap in, open up your third eye, get your shit together, and away we go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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You know, the service you've been asked to perform.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Try to get right back there, right when it stops being fresh.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
I think that it's an inevitable evolutionary development.
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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.