First
I talk little bit about the state of the world and my current
feelings about it all.... Then I give a little overview of what
this special segment is all about.
Many
people probably don't know that The Cosmic Nod podcast began as
some earnestly recorded conversations with friends and peers about
their ayahuasca experiences as I prepared for my very first this
past August.
Enter
The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo. A brilliant thinker, artist,
musician, actor, podcaster, writer, and many other -ers that I
became a fan of through podcasts like Future Fossils, The Rainbow
Brainskull Podcast and Expanding Mind.
I
gathered through his various pod appearances that he might have
some tales/wisdom to share on the topic of Ayahuasca and decided to
reach out to him via the rectangular digital interface we had
become friendly through. I spoke to him a few days before I
left for the Peruvian amazon.
As
you'll hear at the time of this recording I was still brainstorming
on a name for the project, I hadn't fully committed to the idea of
a regular podcast yet and beyond trying to get some perspective on
what I was headed into, I didn't even really know what I was going
to do with the very conversation we were recording.
I'm
loosely and generically calling this series
Ayahuasca Dialogues
which is just going to be a
mini-series I present through The Cosmic Nod. If that sounds
confusing don't worry it really isn't. I spoke to roughly a
dozen people that I knew or was introduced to seeking their
thoughts, advice and stories about the Ayahuasca experience and
that's all there is to it. It is an extremely limited pool of
people and extremely lacking in the diversity I would normally seek
but this was not an attempt to add anything significant to the
lexicon of Ayahuasca, just a quickly inspired personal project of
exploration that occured over 7 days before my excursion.
Regardless of all these journalistic shortcomings I find the
conversations extremely fascinating, informative and enjoyable.
I
could excitedly listen to Michaelagelo talk about pretty much
anything for endless hours. If you took the energy of
Terrence Mckenna, Michael WInslow, Salvador Dali and Robin Williams
and put it through a blender it would probably taste a lot like him
but yet it would still be missing the deeply unique thing that he
is beneath his memetic masks.
He
recently released a short companion piece to this episode (along
with is own riffs on the pandemic) on his podcast 'Self Portraits
as Other People' a few days ago and you should check it
out!
At
the tail of this episode I included the audio from Michaelangelo's
2014 appearance on a series called The Ayahuasca Monologues ( which
I later drew some inspo from name wise ) .
He had shared it
with me prior to our talk and I refer to it a few times early in
the convo.