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Thoughts and writing on God Sees Everything

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I spoke with Ben about Sunday. About how it worked and didn't work. About how I need to get clear on the content of the work.

• On WHY I am doing this project. I am doing this project to come to terms with the vastness of the universe and how we all know that to be true but the ways in which we socially and culturally deal with that can be dangerous, unclear, and misleading. I am trying work within that space between what we know to be deeply mystifying god-like universal spirituality and the most corrupt realities of our society. And I investigating the space via psychedelic drugs because psychedelics so clearly straddle those two worlds.
• psychedelics relate to trash, to nazi germany, to capitalism, to privilege, to experiences of freedom, to corruption, to lies and story-telling, to manipulation, to California idealism, to hypocritical hippy cultures, to opportunities, to cultures of art and music and parties and raves and aesthetic and whiteness, to white culture, to to the belief systems of whites as more evolved, more enlightened. To mythos of white people coming from stars, to the commodification of spiritual experiences, to drug policy, drug wars, to organized religion
• psychedlics relate to oneness, collectivity, vastness, light, god, the universe, dimensions of time and space, to patterns and geometric shapes, to transformation, to healing, to PTSD, to mental illnesses, to growing and forgiving and seeing things differently, to letting go, to surrendering to a drug, to leaving reality as we most often experience it. 
• On what I am saying. I am saying, "Hey, these worlds are related and unhealed. You can acknowledge it all at the same time."
• On what the purpose of this work is. To work within the relationship between disparity and oneness. To the desperately intimate proximity of wholeness and fragmentation through the topic of psychedelic drugs.
• What Am I trying to say? That is the only place that God lives and it is not easy, it is not integrated, or comfortable, but it is what we have and I can only consider both the light and the dark in order to make work worth making.
• There is this interest in GOD. In religion. In the spiritual. 
• I want to know how do we cope with that elusive intimate proximal mind-bending unknown-yet-unquestionably-sensed truth (aka God). 
• How psychedelic drugs bring us closer to that? And how is that crazy thing I am referring to as God so implicitly tied to politics, to society, to privilege, to race, to history, to capitalism, to body politics. How does one reconcile that? 
• Is this project my attempt to reconcile that? I don't think so. I mean, I don't have any plans for reconciling, just acknowledging, seeing, noting, listening, being aware of that implicit relationship. And I am trying to understand that often unconscious and complex and tricky relationship between God and body politics.

I find a lot of people, colleagues, friends have strong opinions about psychedelic drugs. Some of them are affirming their power and importance, others are questioning and casting doubt about the need for them. But they do exist. In nature. In labs. And they do things to people that change them irrevocably.

One of the things I thought about on Sunday but also before Sunday is how if you see someone on say psilocybin for example, they don't appear enlightened or alive and awake to the universe and connected to all. Sometimes they feel gone, unavailable, dumb, out of it, confusing, weird, boring. But their experience is one of connection and awareness and lightness and aliveness. So what is the disconnect there about? Why is that the case? How is that experience so "real" and yet so isolated within the self and/or only with others on drugs? And I also think that when people are on psychedelic drugs they might find sober people to be closed, unaware, different, scary, intimidating but maybe also beautiful, perfect, and lovely. There is this clear separation. Within such a mind-blowing spiritual experience such as psychedelic drugs, what is that fragmentation about?

Another thought: People keep talking about how drugs stories are like dreams, no one fucking cares except the person telling the story because the essence is so non-transmittable within the context of conversation/words. Hmmm... maybe this dance project is to represent and transmit every lost drug story, every disregarded or misunderstood dream.

The more and more I think about Sunday, the more I value it. The more real and alive and intimate I realize it was. I wrote a lot of memories about it the other day. I thought about posting them here... not sure if I will yet.

God Sees Everything: L.A. and S.F.

homeLA, November 2013

The News, SOMArts, San Francisco, December 2013