Alex and Allyson Grey, visionary artists behind COSM’s 12,000 sq ft Entheon (fundraising via Kickstarter since 2015), blend sacred geometry—ten directional angels and a teak Adam/Eve door—with psychedelic philosophy, linking consciousness to reality through DMT/LSD experiences. Their 40-acre Hudson Valley compound hosts full-moon ceremonies since 2003, rejecting dogma for "Art Psalms" and universal wisdom. At Burning Man (2016), their Mayan Warrior art car and foam murals mirror mycelial networks, while Rogan highlights MAPS’ breakthroughs: 85% PTSD remission in veterans via psilocybin, Ibogaine’s rapid opioid cure. Nixon’s anti-psychedelic crackdown, they argue, was fascist repression of counterculture—now, Entheon could redefine mystical spaces for a hyperconnected era. [Automatically generated summary]
This is the planned corner, one of the angels of the four corners, that the direction of the building that we're kind of recycling the carriage house It has the corners of the buildings pointing in the cardinal directions.
So I thought that a feature of them, there will be angels of the north, south, east, west.
And part of the whole thing is getting the four quadrants together.
On top of the building, there's a steeplehead that is basically a four-faced being that is the people of the four directions coming together in visionary oneness.
So, as a building, it's a big, basically, godhead.
One of the coolest things about the video that is in there is that it shows a kind of spin around of the building itself that was done by these amazing...
That's from the front.
So you've got a kind of evolutionary thing going on on the sides.
So you really did the caduceus and then sort of replicated the DNA, which a lot of people believe was what the caduceus was based on in the first place, right?
On the end of this paintbrush, which is kind of flying up and indicating a kind of upward trajectory, There's a drip coming off of it, and the drip also looks like an eyeball.
The center of the eyeball is the Earth.
And there's a skeleton, a child, and a person who's fully grown, woman and man, on either side.
And they each are reaching for the planet.
Now the question is, who's going to get the ball, basically?
I mean, there's indications that, you know, like, you don't know how money's going to come in.
This campaign is only to finish the exhibition interiorly.
And then, you know, if we still, which I think we will need to raise another $1.5 million today, To do the sculptural exterior, which is done by a 3D printout.
There are places that do it out here, but we found a place so close, and they're Doing the Brooklyn Academy of Music and some of the big buildings in the city.
Whenever you have something that you're gonna call a church or a religion or you have a sacred area where you take it very, very seriously, you're gonna have at least one person who has an elevated Profile.
You know, there's going to be one person or people who run this thing that other people are going to look at like they're different than us.
They are elevated.
They are the people that are in charge of this.
And when people have that feeling that they feel like they're the elevated one, God, that gets tricky.
And like a lot of artists, we feel like when we're really doing our thing, that there's a spiritual element of that, that your creativity and spirituality somehow seem like they're very strongly connected.
Basically, emanations of a cosmos that's creative, then we're little embodiments of creative energy.
And that creative energy can be used for the positive or the negative.
And it comes from the way that you view the world, how you're going to take that.
And so as an emanation of creative energy, an artist is just a, you know, like an obvious symbol of that.
And so we see that throughout history that All the religions, whether they agreed or disagreed, all used creative expression to get their message out.
And so it's one of the things that unites all the different wisdom traditions and unites a lot of other stuff that would consider itself outside of religion as well.
I feel that creativity itself is the original kind of religious impulse.
It's the way of knowing oneself, the way of knowing God.
It's a means of worship.
I mean, we look at the cave art and you say, You know, they weren't talking about sects or something or disagreeing necessarily as like religious kind of ideas and things like that.
They were making a mark of meaning and left behind something that was meaningful to their tribe.
And I think that that's still what we're trying to do.
I think religion, because it scares the shit out of really intelligent people for good reason because it's such a mess in the world and created such a mess and so much divisiveness, something that's supposed to be about love that's caused so much heartache and damage.
What I think is that when I told my friend Robert Jesse from the Council on Spiritual Practices, well, I'm spiritual but I'm not religious.
You know, you're saying, well, you know, Alex, we can't let the fundamentalists own the word religion.
Religion is too important a word.
What we need are courageous experiments in religion that could help us to get to the other side of the bell curve, the evolutionary edge.
Is there an evolving edge for religion?
Could we get post-secular in the world?
Can we imagine a world where people have...
Most of the people of the world have taken a sacrament of one kind or another and have realized that there's an infinite intelligence at the basis of the cosmos that they are, you know, an expression of.
And that life is a divine display, a spectacle, you know, that God's gone to a lot of trouble to create.
And so, you know, from the perspective of today, what, you know, because Toynbee, when he was writing about civilizations, talked about, you know, every civilization needs a spiritual you know, every civilization needs a spiritual core.
And as a planetary civilization, you can't have one religion dominate.
It's impossible.
It's just not possible.
And so, how do you unite a world spiritually?
Well, my candidate is the creative arts, you know, that all the world cultures have some means of creative expression.
We get to know that culture through their music, through their, you know, painting, sculpture, various kinds of things.
And that's how we get to know each other and see our connections, you know.
And so as a potential, Something that's been used by all world religions.
You know, it's something that, as a de facto, for the people who don't believe in God anymore, many of them still believe that artists are trying to do something authentic and truthful to their inner being.
Creative energy starts to infiltrate into destructive energy.
What I'm saying is, if the artist...
We might clean up the neighborhood a little, you know, and make it more habitable for people to want to look at their relationship with spirit through even the lens of religion.
Because religion is associated in most people's minds with deities.
Religion is associated in most people's minds with ancient traditions, ancient traditions that oftentimes stifle your behavior, tell you what to do, control you, and offer horrendous consequences for not complying.
That's what a lot of people think of when they think of the word religion.
But you have this thing, but let me get to this real quick.
You have this thing, this beautiful thing.
Why even put a name to it?
Why label it?
And when you're labeling it, you're connecting it with all these other religions that are so problematic and you're going to have to explain your way out of that.
Why do that instead of just have this amazing center?
So the idea being that the religion or these churches were set up so that people could reconnect with God.
So they go about their day, they're filled with troubles and strife and all sorts of stress, and they can go back to the church and they can reconnect with God through religion.
You go to these pilgrimage places and there is tremendous power because a lot of people invested a lot of love energy into a center and they built a shrine to whatever they believed that spirit to be.
And that is part of a long tradition of a connectedness with a You know, their lens into the infinite, you know, whatever religion you're looking through, iconic, aniconic.
Yes, they're a hell of a lot of trouble when you get to the secondary religious, you know, experience, which is everything else that you think about religion.
The primary religious experience, every religion started with a mystical experience.
And people are having those on acid every day now.
And so, what, do you disconnect from that whole tradition where people were connecting to the infinite before?
You say, this has nothing to do with that.
Or do you say, hey, religion's fucked up, but what if we reimagine it?
What if we reimagine God?
And can't we do it and say, this has a lot going for it, this quest for the infinite absolute mystery that's at the core of our being and the core of the cosmos.
This quest to know that, it leads to science, it leads to art, it's the quest to know the truth about the nature of reality.
And so that quest Is another reason why I think that if you harness that to creativity, just artists.
Artists hate dogma.
You can't have a dogmatic.
I mean, artists always disagree.
And you're always going to have new vantage point.
You're always going to have one evolving point of view.
That's part of the trouble of religion is that they get, you know, this is the right way and it's only like this.
We're not going to look beyond the boundaries of what, you know, people made up long ago as the way it's supposed to be in another century when, you know, we didn't know any of the stuff that we know now.
So that does make sense.
So any good religion ought to, their view of reality, at least science ought to be incorporated into it.
So you couldn't have a truthful religion without science.
That's where it gets really fascinating, is the tax-exempt status of religion.
Religion is so odd in that way, that worshipping and being in a place where you worship, even if it's very clear that there's a lot of profit being made, you don't have to pay taxes on that.
I just want to tell you this, just a touch of the history of why we became a church, because it wasn't really ever our intention to become a church.
All the way from the beginning, 1985, when we visioned the temple simultaneously, Alex and I, on our first MDMA journey, lying on the bed, we both came out of it having visioned the circular temple.
But we both saw this temple and we knew that this was sort of like our joint mission.
This was the thing we were going to do together.
We went in art school, so Alex always had his art, and I had my art.
We shared a studio, but this was something we were going to do together.
We never thought we would become a church.
But here we were building this sacred site, and then all through our life, We started visiting sacred sites like we just came from St. Mark's in Venice and we see Chartres Cathedral and we go there with groups of people and go on pilgrimage to these sacred beautiful art places.
But anyway, the way we became a church was a friend of ours who She started Sirius Satellite Network, actually.
She's Martine Rothblatt.
But she loves Alex's work.
She's a collector.
She loves the work we're doing, COSM, with the community and all this.
And she said, you know, you're doing everything the churches do.
You're doing weddings, baby blessings, and memorials.
You have a prayer book, you know, basically the arts.
You're doing everything the churches do, and you're not getting any of the benefits of what churches get.
She's the one that funded, granted us, you know, getting together with our guy who went through the process with us.
It took a good long time.
You have to basically write a lot of essays, and then they give you more essays.
And it was maybe three times through essays, and you write them all, and then you submit the liturgy.
Eventually, just at the moment we were moving to the country, it was like the same minute.
The church status just magically came in after four years.
It was like all like coming together, you know.
So as it is, though, we have 40 acres.
And then we had to fight with our town over, you know, every church in our town.
And there's mosques and Buddhist, you know, stupas and, you know, lots of Catholic and every kind of Protestant.
And they were not paying real estate tax.
And we have this 40 acres and they were raising our taxes 15% every year.
Meanwhile, we're not making any money.
Alex and I are volunteers at COSM, by the way.
And so we make nothing.
We just give it away.
And the whole place we're giving away, it belongs to the community.
And the community It's everybody who's spiritual and creative, but it tends to have a lot of psychedelophiles, people who feel like they've experienced the divine and they want a place to go ahead and talk about it.
They wanted this in the city when we were in Manhattan for five years.
It was just a place where you could go and talk about this.
Because it's legal to talk about it.
And we would always have security and make sure there wasn't, you know, anything being passed around because we can't get into trouble because we're, like, really legitimate.
We're doing this in a legitimate way.
It took us four years to get our permits to do this building.
Well, that's what happened was a shaman told us that we had this whole idea of this temple we wanted to build, but where's your community?
You know, building a temple is the work of a community, he said.
So we're going to start full moon ceremonies in your home in Brooklyn.
So we did.
We started in January of 2003, 164 consecutive full moons ago.
We started them in our loft in Brooklyn.
And then we got a place in Manhattan, 12,000 square feet.
We did it for five years.
Then we found this...
It's a permanent location in Wappinger, New York.
It's in the Hudson Valley, like 65 miles from the city.
You can get there on the train, but we found this lovely old retreat center all kind of imploding and, you know, and we've been, you know, working on it one building at a time.
The Carriage House, which is turning into Entheon, the first temple of visionary art that we really came there to build, It's building four, actually.
We have a 10-bedroom Victorian guest house and an office in our studio.
So we have six buildings to work on, and we're on building four.
But anyway, this is like a little retreat center that we're leaving to our community, our spiritual, creative, cosmonaut community.
Yes, but awful people all throughout that one religion.
I mean, there's got to be some sort of a connection with suppression.
Suppression of sexuality, suppression of ideology, forcing people to behave in a certain way, and these blowbacks, and also the fear.
I mean, I was raised Catholic.
And I went to Catholic school when I was a young kid, and I remember, I didn't go to kindergarten, I just went right into first grade, and I remember the fear, the constant fear that they injected in you.
This idea of what religion is, it was great for me, because it just queered me off religion so young, so early off, I was like, oh, okay, well this is all nonsense.
Before that, when I was young, my parents were getting divorced, and when my parents were splitting up, I was really scared.
I was really nervous, and I was young, and there was a lot of violence going around.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming, and I needed something.
And so I remember when I was little, I was always talking about God.
And it was just like, well, there's got to be, if all these people around me are out of their mind, and everyone's crazy, there's got to be God.
So I was actually excited to go to Catholic school.
I was excited to go to church.
I thought of it as, well, maybe these people, these relatives and these family members that I live with are all crazy, but there's going to be a place that I can go where I'm going to be able to be loved, and it's going to be calm, and God has rules, and everyone's going to follow them.
And I went there, and I was like, oh, good lord.
No pun intended.
This fucking place is worse!
I was like, these people are out of their minds!
And my parents were gonna put me in there for second grade, and I literally told them I'd run away from home.
Well, that's one good thing about growing up in a really fucked-up household, is that you have a constant sense of danger, because you're around danger all the time, so you don't get to sleep cuddly, you don't get to rest calm, and you have an acute awareness of all the possibilities.
So, I mean, ultimately, that was a great thing for me.
There's always a balance between mindfulness and paranoia.
You don't want to be that guy that carries a gun to the bathroom.
I know a lot of people that have surpassed this awareness and gone into this acute paranoia.
I have this statement that I've been saying a lot lately, but I think it's important to bring up.
I don't think human beings are designed to take in the bad news of seven billion people.
I think the numbers that we deal with on a daily basis, with all the different stories of the world, They are too much for us to handle.
You're supposed to deal with what's going on in your community with a watchful eye on the rest of the world.
You shouldn't be deeply engrossed in all of the most disgusting aspects of the rest of the world 24 hours a day.
And I think that's one of the real problematic issues of our time with social media and with the news that people have this distorted sense of what the world is.
They think this world is just filled with violence and horror.
No, the world is fine.
It just occasionally has violence and horror.
There's just so many people and the world is so big that if you look at all those people and this giant globe that we're on, then you can kind of get a sense that the sky is falling.
But if you go outside right now in Woodland Hills, it's beautiful.
And I think that's the same thing with someone who grows up in a bad environment.
I think you could get a distorted perception of what the world is and think that the bad environment that you're currently in is the entire world.
And it can shape your perceptions and your interactions and therefore shape how you react to other people and shape your actual reality.
You know, it's one of the things that I've truly tried to impart upon people that I've learned I believe that how you treat people and your interactions with people literally change your reality.
And this is from mistakes that I've made and this is from positive decisions that I've made.
Because I think that when you look at life in a positive way and you try to treat people kind and you try to be nice to people and you try to move forward with that The people that you interact with, they will get that.
He wrote about it and was very eloquent, and he loved being Catholic, but he didn't like the Pope telling him to paint the Sistine Chapel, for instance.
I just want to say that the purity of the religion, the place where it's really true, you know, like that beautiful, you know, what it actually means at the core, at the heart core of any religion, is expressed through the art of that religion.
So, you know, the other stuff is crap.
You know what I mean?
The way people act towards each other and stuff, that's their own deficits and their own obstacles coming out, you know, all over the place.
Even the popes that have been horrible and allowed, you know, child molestation to perpetrate.
Those people are sick people.
They don't represent the purity of the religion, which is represented in the art.
And doesn't it vary depending upon the individual?
And why does that the purity of the religion, that what you're seeing is the purity of one man's expression, his view, his beautiful view of the world, that we're so fortunate to be able to still look at 500 years later.
I think that because he was part of That tradition, and he was marrying the ideas of the Greek ideal and the Neoplatonic, which was all about universality.
You know, it was really more about, they as much as we're saying, you know, all religions are connected and are basically talking about the one spirit that moves through all of us.
You can call it creative spirit.
I'd prefer to call it something like that rather than some of the names that get so heavily weighted.
Yeah, we discussed this a couple times on previous podcasts, how weighted that word is.
One of the things that I think is amazing about the Sistine Chapel, when you're looking at the two fingers touching, when you're looking at all these beautiful images, is those images They become what people think of when they think of God and they think of religion.
Those images, it's almost like it takes a form on.
And in taking on that form, it gives you a structure to house the ideas and the ideals of these religions.
Like in seeing something, a visual representation, It becomes a real thing.
I grew up in the Jewish tradition, which is a non-iconic tradition.
The Christian tradition really is a story of a person.
They were born, they taught, they healed, they died, they rose.
And in the Jewish tradition, it's non-embodied.
So I resonated with that when I first saw God in LSD, and it was really not a person's face at all, but I recognized that this is what people are talking about when they're talking about God, which is...
This energy that interconnects everything.
It's like the force more than a face.
But that was my experience of God.
And in that experience when I was 20, I recognized this is what people are talking about when they say God.
What I'm saying is that this guy creating these iconic works, he gives it a structure.
He gives it like a scaffolding.
And in that scaffolding of these beautiful paintings, you can kind of form your own categories and have your own chapters in your mind that exist.
It's almost like makes those things real.
Whether or not they ever were real, whether or not they ever were angels on clouds, It's almost inconsequential because the result of it is kind of the same.
If you believe that it's real, if you believe, and this is where religion gets so fucking squirrely.
I know.
Because are you saying that Adam and Eve were the only two people in the world and everybody came from them?
No, absolutely not.
Are you saying that there was a snake and he told Eve to, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, but if you operate your life as if those things were reality, and if you operate your life under the ideals that are transcribed and described in these beautiful paintings, it will become a real past in the sense that it will have a real meaning to you.
It gets real weird in that way.
It's very weird.
And that's where I think art in general, and your art, is particularly important because The things that you paint, you can actually see.
I've seen a lot of the things that you paint.
Maybe not specifically, but one of the things that I remember when I was first introduced to some of your art, I saw...
I forget which one it was.
I've seen so many of your pieces, but I remember going, oh, this guy's seen it like 100%.
You've been there.
When I thought of tryptamine experiences and I saw your art, I was like, oh, this guy, he nailed it.
I mean, some people have come kind of close.
They've kind of...
Even though what you're showing, it doesn't exist in a static form in the tryptamine dimension.
Like, there's no way you can take a...
You know how you take your phone and you take a screenshot?
The beautiful thing about the tryptamine experience is that whatever visual you're experiencing right now will morph into something else and it was one of the most important lessons that I ever learned while tripping was in a DMT experience I had a bunch of negative thoughts.
I don't remember what they were about but I remember the visions that I was having turned dark And like a dark green and black and twisted, like they were contorted and compressed, like a visual representation of negative thinking.
And then I realized that whatever these things are, entities, thoughts, whatever they were trying to express to me the actual negative consequences of thinking like that, That it showed me in a visual form and then I relaxed and thought positive and it literally bloomed in front of me like a flower and then changed into this wildly beautiful Geometric pattern that was like dancing in front of me and I realized
like at that moment Like I realized to myself I said I have to remember this I have to remember this and I have to figure out how to express this because this is an incredible Realization that it's not this, like, abstract idea that, oh, you think negative and negative things happen, you think positive.
No, you're literally manifesting energy.
You're manifesting a certain kind of energy with negative thinking.
It's one of the reasons why we like getting away from negative people.
When someone's, like, really negative and complaining and whining, you're just like, oh, Jesus, I gotta get out of here.
You really feel like they're gonna suck me into their vortex.
You could think of it like an amoeba around your physical body, a cloud of pulsating thought forms.
And as you're imagining the beautiful elements of life and things, it seems to be in a kind of order and maybe kind of wafting upward.
These are like...
The spiritual positive kind of frameworks sometimes that you're seeing life through when you're tripping, you know, and seeing the connections between things, lines forming and things like that.
The more kind of organic geometries that show up.
You see this intelligence of life and the light of divine intelligence that came through for Alison, like in this language.
It seems to be weaving things together.
And when you're in touch with that infinite light that seems to be the source, then you can keep it upwardly moving and very evolutionarily, cosmically, consciously moving forward.
And when then you're thinking regretful thoughts or thinking negative thoughts and anger and things like that, there's a constriction that goes on in your heart, I think, and kind of shuts things down.
And that kind of, like you were saying, twisting in and curling in and darkening and things are all things that when you're Journeying, you see them manifest literally in the flow of the theater of your imagination.
And so I think you really beautifully described that, just in that I was totally there.
And I think there's an analogy to be made about diseases of consciousness that you can get locked into these terrible ways of looking at the world.
And I think that's one of the most important things about what you're trying to do in terms of building a community.
That if you can build a community and build a conscious ideology that is sort of prescribed to people and establish a very positive and loving environment, you can spread that like you can spread a disease.
For no better word, seeds of love or whatever you would call it.
You could do it the wrong way.
You could do it what the Nazis did and do what Genghis Khan did and do what some horrible people throughout history have done.
There are similar things in a lot of ways because there are diseases of ideas.
There are diseases of consciousness.
Or you could do it the right way or a good way or a beneficial way or a positive way.
And it seems like throughout history We almost have to see those negative ones to learn the consequences of letting these things happen.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why Germany won't let in the Scientologists.
They're like, hey, we've seen what happens when cults take over, okay?
We've got a deep history with fucked up group thinking.
So let's just not let you guys in.
And it's what we were talking about before the podcast.
We were talking about Trump.
And what's going on in this country right now?
And I was saying that I think it's probably a good idea to have this moment where we realize, like, oh, we really have to pay attention.
Like, we can't just sit back and not participate anymore.
Because look what's happened.
It's a mockery.
The whole system has, like, been exposed by this one guy as being a joke.
And it's always been a joke.
It's just been a joke that we've accepted.
You know, and we were talking about Hillary and all the criminal investigations that she's under, and that somehow or another, this one person who we know is insincere is a better option than this other person who we know is a jerk-off.
It's rarely been an election where that isn't true.
I thought Obama was a pretty clear choice, and there was a lot of celebrating afterwards, but of course, Then he disappointed people like he predicted he would at his inauguration.
He said, I'm not going to make everybody happy and you're not going to always be happy with me.
Well, representative government is not necessary anymore.
We can communicate instantaneously with people all throughout the world.
We're not talking about sending a raven.
You know, this isn't, you know, the 1300s.
This is an interesting time, and we're not taking advantage of the resources that are available to us as far as representing the actual people.
But I think there's also a problem with that, too, is there's a lot of people that are just completely uneducated, uninterested, slovenly lazy people, and we have to energize those people.
We have to reinvigorate their ideas of participation and of community, and you have to say, like, look, you can't just sit on your couch and eat Twinkies and watch Beverly Hills Housewives.
You can't do that anymore.
Because if you do, you're not allowed to complain about the world being fucked up, because you're a part of the world being fucked up.
And I think until we can energize people, until we can give people this sense that they actually can participate, and it is just a bunch of human beings that are trying to figure out the right and the wrong way to do things.
I think there's a lot of that going on right now.
I think there's this ebb and flow of social media.
Positive aspects of it and negative aspects of it.
But ultimately, I think a lot of that is just us learning to navigate the landscape, this new landscape, this digital, interconnected landscape that's unprecedented in human history.
But I don't think, if we look back in history and they, a thousand years from now, look at this day, the way we're looking at Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci or Genghis Khan or anyone, you look back and you go, wow, what a crazy time.
That's nothing compared to today!
Today is the craziest time ever.
The emergence of artificial intelligence, the emergence of A very bizarre method of communication where you can instantaneously reach people on the entire planet, where data is shared like that amongst hundreds of millions of people instantly.
Well, Teilhard de Chardin talked about the neosphere, you know, about the thinking layer of the earth, you know.
And that's really what enabled.
I mean, you talked about it in the mid-20th century.
And so this thinking layer, thinking atmosphere that's around the Earth now, through satellites, through all of the interactive technology that we're currently speaking on, You know, is a new body for the soul of humanity.
You know, this is now what we're working on now is the theosphere.
You know, that's what we've got to tap and access.
Now we have connectedness with each other.
Now, as a symbol, that should really clue us into something important.
If we look at Other nature systems like the mycelial intelligence that weaves the woods together and that weaves our entire soil and makes it alive, really.
These are spores connected by fibers, and that's what we are.
Well, if you can't explain what's going on in the Pacific Northwest in regards to that, like how enormous the actual individual organism of mycelia connection is in the Pacific Northwest, it's essentially like someone described it, it might have been McKenna, as like a thousand gray whales.
They actually breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide like people.
I've been incredibly fascinated over the last few months with plant intelligence and with plant communication and calculations and this idea that plants have some sort of a consciousness.
And one of the things that I've been tripping out about is acacia trees, where if an animal eats them...
And the wind carries the scent of the acacia tree being consumed.
The bushes and trees downwind smell it and become bitter so that it discourages predation.
And animals were starving.
The downwind animals were starving because they wouldn't eat the bushes from the trees that had taken the scent of the trees that were up north.
I mean, it's madness.
They're literally sending out a signal to the other plants.
I just want to tell everybody out there, come and be a part of the Dr. Brawner Foam Dome Camp and get yourself sprayed with foam and see us paint our murals.
That's where, you know, the rangers, when they go around and they find people who are having a bad time, they go to the Zendo and they take care of them.
And the reason why they even do them at all in one big way is so that you can get on the top of them, so that you can see over everybody else when you go to see the man, and you can see all these fire spinners that are all around this.
Look, Joe, you were really helpful to us when the last time we did the podcast, there was definitely a Rogan bump that happened to the Kickstarter that took us to a new level.
There's going to be a lot of people that are excited about it.
I think the idea behind it is beautiful.
The idea that you guys are leaving it for the community and building it for the community is beautiful.
And that's one of the best arguments for religion that I've ever heard.
And best arguments for having a religion be tax-exempt that I've ever heard.
I mean, you guys are literally doing it for other people.
You're doing it for everybody.
It's awesome.
And, you know, your artwork, I'm just a huge fan of what you do, and I just think that the design itself is literally, like I said, probably the coolest building on the planet.
And it's a real, I mean, what you're doing is essentially an extension of the great works of all these, you know, when you're talking about the Sistine Chapel, or if you're talking about the Egyptian pyramids, or any of these sacred sites that exist all throughout the world, you're doing a modern version of that, and it's amazing.
Well, it's very specific in that if you go back before the 1960s and you look at the art, it really didn't represent the trips.
It just didn't.
And you look at it now, there's a giant body of art that represents these psychedelic trips that really didn't exist before.
So, in a lot of ways, it is a quiet new chapter in the world of art that one day I think people are going to look back on.
Once we realized the ridiculousness of the prohibition on drugs, especially on psychedelic drugs, non-toxic, non-problematic, as far as health repercussions, and you wonder, what was it about our restrictive society that put this sweeping, comprehensive ban on psychedelic substances in 1970, and what were the ramifications?
Well, there was people that were talking about it, and there were certainly people that were recycling and composting and doing things along those lines and trying to leave a smaller footprint back then aware of it.
But as far as a gigantic global conscious movement and also the urgency that's attached to it today where people are stepping back and they're looking at islands disappearing and, you know, they're looking at the rising sea levels and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is real.
This is actually happening inside of our lifetime.
There's a lot going on that I think...
We're in the middle of.
And I think this visionary art that is going on right now, we're sort of in the middle of that.
I think as we look back on it, or as people past us look back on it, they're going to say, this is a very specific era.
This was an era...
Go back and look at religious history and you look at the enlightenment, you look at the various styles of art that's connected to religion or cultural change.
You see these big shifts.
I think the visionary art of psychedelics is a big shift.
I think that it's showing that the big news today is the sacramental Sort of reformation, you know, that there's a return of the sacrament to the West.
It's been demonized and hidden for thousands of years.
Now it's back, and you're not going to get rid of it.
Now it's here because we need it.
There's nothing that's going to turn consciousness around toward a sacred planet that wants to save itself from self-destruction like psychedelics.
There is no greater prescription for soul medicine than this is the stuff that is curing All of the traumatic stress of the vets, you know, marijuana is leading the way in the medicinals and opening the door literally for the sacred drugs, the return of the sacred drugs.
We don't even have a context established in America, but it's beginning.
You know, the UDV church won their right to use the sacrament.
The Native American church has peyote.
There is legal precedent for religious use already, as there has been throughout history, except for the last couple thousand years.
Well, in this country, as you were talking about with MDMA, I mean, just really the last few decades, and 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, I bought that stuff online, like in 2001 or something like that.
You could just order it from some chemical company.
I think one of the things that you said that you just sort of glossed over, but it's incredibly important, is that marijuana is the door opener.
Marijuana is the guy that you let into the party that has the magic dust, and he went, whew, and he blew it on everybody.
Because once that gets in, and especially edible marijuana, because edible marijuana is a psychedelic drug, and many people don't know it, and that's one of the reasons why when people eat brownies or something, they'll say, oh my god, someone laced the brownie.
No, that's what it is.
That is the most potent form of marijuana, is the edible form of marijuana, and it is very visionary, especially in high doses.
It's incredibly introspective, acid-like in a lot of ways.
You know, you get a perspective that is life changing and shifting and it's one of those directional shifts where even if it's a small degree of change over the course of the rest of your life that small degree of change could equal a very large shift in the direction that you're going as you continue down your path that slight turn to the right will make a huge difference five years from now ten years from now I think marijuana becoming legal in Colorado and we are seeing not
just the positive Benefits in terms of the community.
You're looking at people that are making way more money than they've ever made before.
You're looking at housing prices, real estate prices going up, people having a new sense of community where they're like, oh, there's others like us.
It's like a magnet for freaks.
And they've all flown into Colorado and set up shop there.
It's fascinating.
I did a show there a couple months ago at the Belco Theater, and it was amazing.
It was like, this place has changed in a year!
I recorded my last comedy special about two years ago, two years in August, in Colorado, and then I did the most recent one about six months ago in Colorado, the most recent show that I did there.
And I could feel the shift when you're driving down the street.
You see the difference.
There's pot everywhere.
There's people smiling.
The lowest incidence of drunk driving they've ever recorded.
Since it was probably the original or one of the original cultivated plants, I think that humanity over the millennia worked out a symbiotic relationship with this plant and so we have the endocannabinoid system.
Yeah.
And I would say that probably many of our health deficiencies are because we're not getting our cannabis THC deficiencies.
The AMA in the 30s went to Congress and said, please don't make cannabis illegal.
It's in half of our medicine.
You know, for 87 years it's been part of the American pharmacopoeia.
Please allow us to continue to use it.
No.
It was struck down.
And so it's been repressed since then.
And a lot of it has just been pure racism, actually.
Well, that was what those recent papers were released about the Nixon administration.
It's one of the ways they demonize the black rights movement, civil rights movement, and also the anti-war movement, is they attacked marijuana and they attacked psychedelic drugs.
And that was the reason why they passed that sweeping legislation in the first place.
It was just to be able to have a reason to arrest those people.
They knew they could attack the communities, and in attacking those communities, the best way to do it was to go after the drugs.
Nixon hated them, and Nixon was a traitor to America.
Nixon was probably, with Bush, one of the worst we've ever experienced.
And through his hatred and venom, we have the drug war that now for over 40 years, we've just been laboring under the boot of a fascist traitor that once resigned from office.
Well, you remember the revelation that they had a few years back when they were trying to figure out what caused the Salem witch trials, and one of the leading theories was that they had had a late frost, and the late frost had caused These funguses to grow on bread, ergot to grow on bread.
And that when that happened, these people were experiencing very acid-like effects from eating bread.
And they started freaking out and blaming people for it and thinking that they were being possessed.
And it was a whole wave of paranoia that came from that.
It's unbelievably fascinating when you think about it that way.
Like a thousand years ago basically prayed to Mary and said, if you'll cure me of this ergotism, which is very dangerous but it leads to many visions, I will build you the most beautiful temple ever built.
And so he was cured and he did found a shark cathedral, but as a result.
So that's one of the cool things about ergotism and ergot.
But the coolest thing is definitely LSD and Hoffman's ability to stabilize that.
And then, so basically the coolest thing about the psychedelics to me is that they, and the science that has been done, is the Good Friday experiment and Roland Griffith's work And that has basically given us the best evidence for the existence of God because 65% of people who take psilocybin in a safe setting and they're spiritually inclined will have a full-blown mystical experience.
That's now science.
It's proven.
So a majority of people who take a psychedelic basically in a positive setting and they don't, you know, they're not pre-schizo themselves, you know, not a borderline personality if you're stable.
Pre-schizo, yeah, that's important to put out, you know, because I think that a lot of people think that psychedelics are for everybody, but unfortunately there's some folks amongst us that have a very difficult time with just regular stable sobriety.
But I think in the end, they're going to, with science, medicine and science, I think what's going to be found out is that these psychedelics are going to cure schizophrenia.
I really think that when they use it properly, because that's what the science is doing now, they're experimenting with With schizophrenics?
Well, MAPS is really fascinating and amazing, and what they've done is just add an actual intellectual perspective on psychedelic drugs, an undeniably researched, really well-documented perspective that's so important.
I mean, when I had...
My first experiences with MAPS, I remember thinking like, thank God there's someone like this out there.
Someone like Doblin out there, Rick Doblin, who has taken the super intelligent approach to recognizing what these substances are and what are the positive benefits are and how can you get these things slowly but surely through the legal system.
And that's what they're doing now with MDMA. That's what they're doing now with the studies that they're doing on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and all sorts of other people too, police officers, anybody...
Really beneficial things that we're being denied, and we're being denied by people who haven't experienced them, which is the most ironic aspect of it.
It's like someone having penicillin, but they won't let you try it, because they don't use it themselves.
Well, post-traumatic stress disorder, what's really fascinating about it is that there's this reaction to stress, to intense stress, traumatic situations, and that your body has this almost this Intense anticipation of a constant battle of constant stress and that that can be interrupted and that this is there's really no other method I mean you can go to therapy all your life and slowly perhaps slowly erode the memories of this and give
yourself some psychological tools to manage these experiences But as far as like something that can sort of stop it in its tracks There's never been anything that's demonstrated that has the power of psychedelics The post-traumatic stress disorder studies are showing that 85% of vets that have it and are otherwise untreatable are having success after one treatment.
And MAPS got a grant to do a second and third trial.
That means the people, the 15% who didn't You know, really feel a relief from post-traumatic stress disorder, get a second turn and a third turn.
You know, the psychologists basically say that you have to be able to look at your subjective state from another objective observation on that subjective state.
And so that's literally what's happening with the MDMA. You're distanced from it.
You can look at your behavior or what happened to you with more dispassion.
You can have compassion on yourself and start to forgive everyone involved.
It's miraculous and life-changing, which then leads to new neural growth.
In both psilocybin and MDMA, they've been charting that there is new neural pathways.
Not only does it just feel it that way, but it literally is that way.