Tuesday, February 1, 2022

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]