Elevate and Evolve | Cannabis & Psychedelic Culture Blog
Terence McKenna is one our favorite psychedelic luminaries. Here is a short interview of his where he talks about many ideas concerning drugs, legality, and love that are increasingly becoming commonplace among a larger and larger portion of our global populace.
Ideally, we’ll look back at this time in history and laugh at our collective foolishness and hubris.
My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts. – Terence McKenna
Spanish photographer A.L. Crego adds life to his favorite pieces of street art murals by turning them into trippy animated street art GIFs. The street art can stand on it’s own but the messages are given an extra boost with motion.
Davis Ayer is a photographer living and creating in California who takes a unique approach to each photo he creates. Sometimes he uses trippy double exposures, sometimes he varies the frames, and sometimes he adds psychedelic paint – all of which provide beautiful textures to his work.
Ayer’s favorite equipment is a medium format camera (Mamiya with a polaroid back) and a 35mm (Minolta SRT 200). For digital, he uses a Canon 5D Mark II.
Bryan Lewis Saunders likes to take drugs, both legal and illegal, and then draw pictures of himself. The results are strikingly different from drug to drug, and they vary from beautiful to grotesque, abstract and just plain bizarre.
[I’m most interested in] things that are still a mystery to us all. – Bryan Lewis Saunders
Bryan devised an experiment in which every day he took a different drug and drew himself under the influence. These psychedelic self-portraits are a window into Bryan’s different states of mind.
For more of Bryan’s self-portraits make sure to check out his website. Enjoy!
After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self. – Bryan Lewis Saunders
> 30 Self-Portraits Drawn While the Artist Was Under the Influence of 30 Drugs | Alter Net
Hearing Terence talk about his ideas is even better than reading them.
His eloquent passion drips with every spoken word, and his emphasis on certain words reveals glimpses into his mind-set when he was writing.
True Hallucinations is, well, perhaps Publishers Weekly’s hilarious review said it best:
In 1971 ethnobotanist McKenna ( The Archaic Revival ), his brother Dennis and three friends boated to a town in Amazonian Colombia, seeking a hallucinogenic plant that enables the Witoto tribe to talk to elf-like “little men.” In psychedelicized ravings interspersed with diary excerpts, McKenna records their experiences after ingesting mind-altering mushrooms and other psychoactive plants.
A flying saucer slowly flew over McKenna’s head; he calls it a “holographic mirage” of a future technology. Dennis had a revelation about a “psychofluid” that pervades the universe. McKenna flashes forward to Hawaii in 1975 where mantis-like creatures from hyperspace attack his lover, and flashes back to his tantric lovemaking in Tibet and to Indonesia where unrepentant Nazi scientists tried to recruit him in 1970. He posits the existence of a particle of time, the chronon , which conditions matter. A bizarre book. – Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc
Prefer reading: True Hallucinations PDF
Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors. – Terrence McKenna
Ever wanted to be ultra spiritual? Well, look no further than JP Sears parody video that hilariously captures the essence of what it means to be spiritual today.
Perhaps it is our ability to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously is what increases our spiritual growth.
JP Sears is an inner coach who strives to empower people to live more meaningful lives as whole individuals by guiding them to move beyond their symptoms of pain and sabotage.
Regardless of his mission statement, JP absolutely kills it in this video. It’s a well produced timely piece that is hilariously accurate.
Keegan and Jordan misunderstand the tone of each other’s text messages while trying to make plans. The square amped with coffee freaks out while the stoner remains chill on cannabis.
Dry Ice experiments are very cool! You can make bombs, you can make bubbles float on dry ice, you can even make a dry ice whoopee cushion!
With a little no how and the right tools you can make some awesome reactions happen.
Check out these videos and impress your friends, or just trip yourself out, with what’s possible when science meets dry ice.
After featuring the psychedelic vision of the Mantis Shrimp, the hilarious True Facts About Animals series is back with some love for Cephalopods.
It is widely known that the interesting-ness of an animal is proportionate to how difficult it is to figure out where its butthole is. The octopus therefore is very interesting.
Cuttlefish are the kings of camouflage and their mating begins when the male delicately grabs the female by her face and inserts another specialized tentacle into an opening near her mouth, which hopefully is not her nose.
Cephalopods, the class of mollusks which scientists classify octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, can change color faster than a chameleon. They can also change texture and body shape, and, and if those camouflage techniques don’t work, they can still “disappear” in a cloud of ink, which they use as a smoke-screen or decoy.
Cephalopods are also fascinating because they have three hearts that pump blue blood and are thought to be the most intelligent of invertebrates. – Dr. Wood, Cephalopod Researcher
Nyjah Huston has got skills for days. His smooth style makes his tricks look even doper as he flip tricks into and out of sick grinds and gnarly jumps.
Huston has been dominating the street circuit with 1st place eluding him only 6 times since 2010. Nyjah has owned 1st place since Street League Skateboarding 3rd Series in New Jersey in 2012.
Below you’ll find some sweet video compilations of Nyjah Huston killing it on his skateboard, he may fall at times but he always gets up and delivers a showstopping trick, enjoy!
Yo, if you’re wondering why Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” track is chilling on this page, let me fill you in.
All the videos are amazing but I find that this track playing in the background while watching the “OG Edit” video is straight money. So mute that sucker and hop on this track while Nyjah Huston shadow dances all over the scene.
Nature is up to its amazing feats once again. The ant colony featured in this video is so big that it would be the equivalent of building the great wall of china.
Now I can’t speak on the method of excavation, concrete dumped into the colony then excavated, but I do hope that the majority of the colony moved on before the concrete came down to freeze this epic structure in time.
I’ve highlighted ant hills that were made into sculptures using aluminum in the past but this behemoth of a structure is a metropolis in comparison.
This giant ant hill is a testament to the complexity of life on this planet, all living things continue to grow and evolve creating things that we have never seen before, there is tons of excitement left in what we don’t know.
This short film combines 300,000 photos of riots, wildfires, and paintings in abandoned houses. The entire stop motion time lapse was created without any digital special effects.
Circle of Abstract Ritual began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing.
The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug.
I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.
