Shamans Among The Machines ~ Talk by Terence McKenna (repost)

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Terence McKenna (1946 ~ 2000) has been studying the ontological foundations of Shamanism and the Ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation for the past quarter century. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, Terence has emerged as a powerful voice for the psychedelic movement and the emergent societal tendency he calls The Archaic Revival. Poetically dispensing enlightened social criticism and new theories of the fractal dynamics of time, Terence deobfuscates many aspects of the visionary lexicon, and then some. As Artist Alex Grey suggests, "In the twilight of human history, McKenna's prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work."

[Source: Terence McKenna Land. Brought to my attention by Melissa Lin. First posted 8 September 2012]

A True Visionary and Oracle of the New Evolutionary Spiral

HIGHly Educational Videos on YouTube (revisited)

AWAKENING, ESCHATOLOGY & ENTHEOGENS 2012 
An interview with Neil Kramer, the man behind the blog "the Cleaver." Neil joins us to discuss his articles, his Awakening, Consciousness, Self-Actualization, Spirituality, Entheogens, Eschatology and much more. Topics Discussed: 9/11, The Matrix, Recognizing the Conspiracy, the Unveiling, 2012, Rebooting The Planet, The Mayan Calendar, Ian Lungold & Carl Johan Calleman, Terence McKenna's "Timewave Zero," Disappearance, The Rapture, from 3D to 4D, Media and Imprinting, Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent, Ayahuasca, Fractal Geometry, Structure of the Universe and much more.



ENTHEOGENIC DNA: invisible landscapes are all around us, we are multidimensional beings. Perception is a frequency, a bandwidth, and so is Being. Tune in... Enjoy!

[Inspired by a timely forward from Ilona Anna Maj, first posted 7 June 2008, reposted 4 June 2018]

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]

Get The Message (in 9 minutes) ~ by Terence McKenna

Uploaded on 15 Jun 2011

Terence McKenna talks about culture, 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms and self empowerment, from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled 'Eros And The Eschaton.'

Watch this selected playlist of Terence McKenna videos. For full McKenna talks click here - or check out The Psychedelic Salon Podcast (this lecture is filed under 'Psychedelics: What Science Forgot')

With thanks to revolutionloveevolve!

[Brought to my attention by Quetzalcoatl Ehecatl. First posted 20 January 2014]