The Entheogenic Art of Alex Grey (revisited)

entheogen |enˈthēəˌjen; -jən|
noun - a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes.

entheogenic |enˌthēəˈjenik| adjective - ORIGIN 1970s: from Greek, literally ‘becoming divine within’; coined by an informal committee studying the inebriants of shamans.

Alex Grey was born in Columbus, Ohio on November 29, 1953 (Sagittarius), the middle child of a gentle middle-class couple. His father was a graphic designer and encouraged his son's drawing ability. Young Alex would collect insects and dead animals from the suburban neighborhood and bury them in the back yard. The themes of death and transcendence weave throughout his artworks, from the earliest drawings to later performances, paintings and sculpture. He went to the Columbus College of Art and Design for two years (1971-73), then dropped out and painted billboards in Ohio for a year (73-74). Grey then attended the Boston Museum School for one year, to study with the conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav.


At the Boston Museum School he met his wife, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey. During this period he had a series of entheogenically induced mystical experiences that transformed his agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. The Grey couple would trip together on LSD. Alex then spent five years at Harvard Medical School working in the Anatomy department studying the body and preparing cadavers for dissection.


He also worked at Harvard's department of Mind/Body Medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Alex's anatomical training prepared him for painting the Sacred Mirrors (explained below) and for doing medical illustration. When doctors saw his Sacred Mirrors, they asked him to do illustration work.

Grey was an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and Figure Sculpture for ten years at New York University, and now teaches courses in Visionary Art with Allyson at The Open Center in New York City, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the California Institute of Integral Studies and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.

In 1972 Grey began a series of art actions that bear resemblance to rites of passage, in that they present stages of a developing psyche. The approximately fifty performance rites, conducted over the last thirty years move through transformations from an egocentric to more sociocentric and increasingly worldcentric and theocentric identity. The most recent performance was WorldSpirit, a spoken word and musical collaboration with Kenji Williams which was released in 2004 as a DVD.

Grey's unique series of 21 life-sized paintings, the Sacred Mirrors, take the viewer on a journey toward their own divine nature by examining, in detail, the body, mind, and spirit. The Sacred Mirrors, present the physical and subtle anatomy of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. Begun in 1979, the series took a period of ten years to complete.


It was during this period that he developed his depictions of the human body that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality, and reveal the interplay of anatomical and spiritual forces. After painting the Sacred Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as praying, meditation, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth, nursing and dying. Grey’s recent work has explored the subject of consciousness from the perspective of “universal beings” whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and infinite galactic swirls.


Renowned healers Olga Worral and Rosalyn Bruyere have expressed appreciation for the skillful portrayal of clairvoyant vision his paintings of translucent glowing bodies. Grey's paintings have been featured in venues as diverse as the album art of TOOL, SCI, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, Newsweek magazine, the Discovery Channel, Rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Feature Inc., Tibet House, Stux Gallery, P.S. 1, The Outsider Art Fair and the New Museum in NYC, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Alex has been a keynote speaker at conferences all over the world including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and Manaus. The international psychedelic community has embraced Grey as an important mapmaker and spokesman for the visionary realm.

A large installation called Heart Net by Alex and his wife, Allyson, was displayed at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum in 1998-99. A mid-career retrospective of Grey's works was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999. The large format art book, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey has been translated into five languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies, unusual for an art book. His inspirational book, The Mission of Art, traces the evolution of human consciousness through art history, exploring the role of an artist's intention and conscience, and reflecting on the creative process as a spiritual path.


Transfigurations is Alex's second large format monograph containing over 300 color and black & white images of Grey's work. Sounds True has released The Visionary Artist, a CD of Grey's reflections on art as a spiritual practice. ARTmind is the artist's recent video exploring the healing potential of Sacred Art. Grey co-edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002). The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, a long-term exhibition of fifty works of transformative art by Grey has opened (Fall 2004) in New York City. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter, Allyson Grey and their daughter, the actress, Zena Grey.

Cosmic Christ

The Alex Grey Guitar

[With special thanks to Melissa Lin for introducing me to Alex Grey! First published 23 December 2008, reposted 27 )ctober 2013]

Alex Grey and the Mind Parasites (repost)

Extracted from a fascinating 19-minute podcast published by Jonathan Zap at ZapOracle...

Alex Grey was in a loft in Boston where a colleague of Timothy Leary had given a group of 15-20 people, most of them quite inexperienced, LSD. Alex took a double dose. The social environment of Alex’s trip was extremely chaotic - some people were laughing uncontrollably, some were vomiting, some were groping other people, and there was no one who was managing the chaos.

Alex began to have an out-of-body experience, and found himself hovering above the weirdness of what was going on in the loft. On some different plane he saw deities drinking from a pool of “electric milk” a “vast lake of timpani,” of “vibrating energy.” Alex described the vision as follows:

“I had a vision of the group soul of humanity as a perfectly circular pool of intense living light. All around the rim of the milky pool were a complex variety of sexual rites, a metaphor for all social interaction. Translucent Hindu deities swooped over the group taking the excessive energy of the shimmering pool and passing through the group as ecstasy and pain. I saw that the reason we were all brought together was to provide a psychic energy feast for the Gods and Goddesses. I saw my heart as the axis of karmic, earthly, and universal energies, transected by and uniting the polarities of male/female, birth/death, good/evil, and love/hate. To maintain a balance of forces we all fed both Deities and Demons.”

This visionary experience eventually became the masterpiece: Demons and Deities Drinking from the Milky Pool.


A Vision of the Top of the Food Chain


The demons and deities were feeding from a pool of “vibratory energetic milk” created from human activities of all kinds, though Alex used sexual coupling to represent human activities in general. I suggested that that the couplings were visual shorthand of human energetic transactions of all kinds and Alex responded enthusiastically to that description. Apparently, the deities were drinking from a vibratory pool of the energetic metabolism of the species so that through the pool they were drawing energy from the entire species.

A reductive way of describing Alex’s vision is to say that it represents the very top of the food chain. The painting, however, is much more than that; it is a revelation of the human form transcending the food chain. Transcendence does not mean removing or floating above something. What you transcend is still present, and the transcendent state includes that which is transcended while new vistas of awareness are added.


Alex’s paintings are “forbidden seeing” - revelations of what is hidden but that the species desperately needs to see. Conventionally we see ourselves as the top of the food chain, but Demons and Deities… reveals this as a delusion convenient to those who harvest our energy. Another realization about this painting is that it is a classic illustration of the alchemical principle of “as above, so below.” We see the same range, if more polarized, of darkness and light amongst the deities at the cardinal points of the mandala as we do in the human couplings that form the perimeter. And there was also a similar dark/light range in the chaotic loft where some people were acting out dark compulsions while Alex was receiving this transcendent vision.

Sexual Chi as Food Source


Alex’s artistic decision to represent all human activities by a range of sexual couplings was no random choice. Sexual chi is a potent energetic food that can be harvested by human parasites and predators and possibly other types of parasites and predators. Orgasms can be viewed as energetic flowers blossoming in the collective human energy field.

The couplings are arranged in a kind of circular spectrum from loving couplings to atavistic, sadistic-looking couplings. Benevolent entities appear to be feeding off the energy of the loving couplings and demonic entities, one of which looks like a devouring vagina, are feeding off of the degraded (sex as a metaphor for power) couplings.

Orgasms, which are energetic eruptions into, and interpenetrations with, the collective human field, vary from the ecstatic unions of loving soulmates to the sadistic ejaculations of rapists. The couplings that Alex depicts in this image can be viewed as a circular spectrum of these possibilities oriented to the cardinal points of a mandala where there are also associated deities.

A Carnival of Lost Souls


The background of Alex’s vision is also interesting and instructive. He was in a chaotic boundary-dissolving experience with a group of people who were predominantly strangers. Socially dense environments of strangers and substances mixing together are likely to default to lowest-common-denominator factors of social parasitism/sexual predation/chaotic acting out of fragmented personalities - what I sometimes call a carnival of lost souls.

Everything depends on who are the particular people in a group that is having a boundary-dissolving experience or ritual. Naïve people frequently forget this. Such people think the ritual is what matters and take all comers, but this can be a disaster!

Generally, I think it unwise to have boundary-dissolving experiences (such as sex and/or hallucinogenic trips) with people you don’t know and wouldn’t trust with your life, because you are trusting your life with them. There are, of course, exceptions to everything and a visionary as great as Alex Grey was able to rise above the experience and receive a powerful vision about human energy and the entities that harvest it. (Though I have a feeling he wouldn’t choose to be in another such chaotic situation.)

Otherwise, I caution people about doing things such as going to a rave with a sketchy vibe redolent of prowling sexual agendas (in other words, almost any rave) and opening themselves to the toxic energy by taking a boundary-dissolving substance. Unless you want to internalize a carnival of lost souls it is probably unwise to blow yourself wide open in an setting of trance-inducing music/lighting and stoned people, many of them on the prowl for parasitic sexual encounters.

An Ancient Gnostic Text on Parasitic Abduction


The power of this image is that it shows those who harvest our energy, and yet at the center of the image is the human empowerment that occurs as we awaken to the food chain. The ancient Gnostics had similar visions and called the harvesting deities the “Archons” (see: A Gnostic View of Mind Parasites). Also, notice how closely the scenario described below parallels a modern alien abduction experience.

(The following ancient Gnostic text is excerpted from the superb metahistory.org website. Here’s the link to the full article.)

LISTEN TO JONATHAN ZAP'S PODCAST HERE.

Alex Grey (left) with Jonathan Zap at Cosm, in New York City

Paintings by Alex Grey

For more background on Alex Grey, go here!

[First posted 24 February 2011, reposted 24 October 2014 & 9 January 2016]

Jonathan Zap, Interdimensional Traveler

"Interdimensional Passport" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap (1990s)

Cosmic Orgasmologists: Alex Grey and Jonathan Zap

THE INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVELER'S CODEX
by Jonathan Zap

At all costs, the interdimensional traveler must never surrender multi-incarnate identity and essence to the Babylon Matrix, or any other such matrix. Since so many readers are most familiar with the hideous strength of the Babylon Matrix, we will give it particular emphasis in this Codex.

From a thousand thousand angles, the dark magnetisms of the Babylon Matrix would love to pull travelers into the wrong ends of telescopes. Essentially, the Babylon Matrix has a tunneling effect that can easily shrink your incarnation until it is like a twisty wormhole burrowing into the festering tissues of a rotten apple. When you choose the wormhole over the rabbit hole your incarnation shrivels and descends like the slow intestinal twisting of an endless, monotonous colonoscopy, winding its way down the wrong end of a telescope.

The Babylon Matrix seeks to remake you in its own image. It would like to play you out as a tragicomic retread, the six billionth remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Interdimensional Traveler.

Teal People are funkier than Real People (photo: Jonathan Zap)

The Babylon Matrix churns out remakes by shrink-wrapping hominids into stock characters. It would love for you to be a frat boy, a homeboy, a drama queen, a geek, a couch potato, a yuppie, a workaholic, a celebrity, a celebrity stalker and so forth. Surrender to its shrinking rays and you might find yourself living out your incarnation as one of these diminutive caricatures, a skin job with a limited shelf life.

In the Eighties, in the early hours of a smoggy and overcast Monday morning on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I first saw what would become a ubiquitous bumper sticker. It read, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” It was as if the veil had pulled back right there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and something I wasn’t supposed to see, one of the underlying black magical spells, actual source code of the Babylon Matrix, suddenly became visible in the manifest realm.

"Parallel Journeys" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap

What potency such spells of darkling magic have! A spellbound victim, laboring under the power of malign enchantment, discovers the spell, the actual contract the devil made him sign in blood, and yet cannot break from it. There it is, the devil’s contract, turning slowly in the spinner rack of a convenience store, rendered word for word onto self-adhesive vinyl. The victim purchases this perfect copy of the spell that rules him and attaches it to the bumper of his car where he sees it every day, and yet he never awakens from its power.

"Interdimensional Traveler" - collage by Jonathan Zap

An interdimensional traveler must never surrender to such spells! These spells are swirling around us like sheets of self-adhesive shrink-wrap spun by a tornado. The tornado is a dark and smoky twister. Spinning within the twister are newspaper headlines, faces, fragments of video, sound bytes of neurotic conversations, glossy magazine torsos---a swirling shrapnel of sticky cultural memes. Lose your footing and the twister rips you out of Oz, out of agrarian Kansas, out of all the infinite places you could be, and shrinks you into an anxious meat puppet, stuck in traffic, worried about being late for the florescent-lit cubicle, unpaid bills and debts stinging like pale scorpions at your shrunken kernel-like mind animated by coffee with non-dairy creamer, kept afloat by serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors and propelled by spell-induced fears.

Is there an engine driving the twister that eludes us, adding invisibly to its torque and stickiness? The interdimensional traveler will at least keep that an open question. He knows that there are other worlds than these, and who can account for all the forces that interpenetrate the Babylon Matrix?

Certainly there is no ambiguity about the existence of the agents of the twister, the enforcers and minor black magicians of the Babylon Matrix. They are all around us, uttering their obvious and yet potent and insidious spells from school yards, televisions, street corners, classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms, from the thousand thousand blind alleys of the Babylon Matrix.

Jonathan Zap earns his stripes as an intrepid explorer of ontological rabbit-holes

The interdimensional traveler must not step through the wrong ends of telescopes! The interdimensional traveler must not let anxious voices, inner or outer, hurry them down narrowing corridors. The interdimensional traveler must not step onto the conveyor belts of degrading and dreary timelines!

God as the Ultimate Narcissist (self-portrait by Jonathan Zap)

Some foolish interdimensional travelers will perceive these injunctions through the exciting, intoxicating and scintillating distortion fields of the archetype of the eternal youth. These archetype-possessed travelers will see the injunctions of what not to do as an infinite license to indulge, and though they emulate Peter Pan on steroids, they end up as flabby Peter Pans with kidney damage, divorcing the Babylon Matrix only to marry flaccid Never Never Lands where obese lost boys play video games in their mothers’ basements. The path of the interdimensional traveler is not a license to indulge, it is a space that opens when the imagination of the eternal youth and the impeccability of the Warrior meld. It is a path that demands prodigious will and discipline. If you try to follow the path of the interdimensional traveler without will and discipline, you will end up as a pathetic lost boy of some sort, sucking weakly at the soured edges of the Babylon Matrix, caught in a grey limbo where embittered contempt for the realm of shrink-wrapped, spell-driven drones melds with a parasitic dependence on the fruits of drone labor.

Mr Zap getting his crown chakra refurbished

Portals open for the traveler on a mission of compassion who is aligned with his true will. Different portals may open for a dark traveler possessed of and by a dark will. Still another set of portals open for the young fool traveler who may, for example, step through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Certain intentions beckon certain matrices, for better and for worse.

Interdimensional by Herban Mama

An interdimensional traveler must be a Warrior, must have a moral purpose, and must be aware of all the shrinking rays that press upon us. The price of freedom for the interdimensional traveler is eternal vigilance about the sticky enchantments that would like to bind us to the Babylon Matrix and turn individualized travelers into hordes of automatons and hungry ghosts. To step across the event horizon you need to molt the many layers of malign enchantment encasing your soul.

Go then, there are other worlds than these...

[GET COMPLETELY ZAPPED @ ZAPORACLE!]

Interesting read: Zapped by the Blogospheric Multilinkverse