Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan is a stand-up comic and comic actor. He appeared as a character in the sitcom NewsRadio, as a host on the reality show Fear Factor, and — with an apparently extensive martial arts background — as a color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. His comedic style is iconoclastic and confrontational. He has frequently accused other comedians of plagiarism, and has publicly espoused a number of conspiracy theories regarding the Apollo moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, and the attack on the World Trade Center. He has challenged Wesley Snipes to a mixed martial arts combat. He has been an occasional guest on the Mancow Show and the Howard Stern show; he has a sensory deprivation tank in his basement. He has also — and this is probably no surprise by now — been deeply influenced by the theories of Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman about DMT.

In 2005, Rogan was a guest on a talk show run by Jim Breuer called Breuer Unleashed, which appears regularly on weekdays on the Sirius Satellite Radio channel Raw Dog Comedy. In response to a caller’s question, Rogan launched into a ten-minute discourse on DMT, dreams, and the nature of humanity — a mashup of McKenna, Strassman, and his own idiosyncratic interpretations, all laced with the most remarkable profanity. “It’s easily the weirdest interview I’ve ever done,” Rogan says, “and definitely the most interesting.” The audio of the broadcast is here:

Simon Posford

But wait — there’s more. Shpongle — the group has both a discussion forum and a fan site — is a psychedelic downtempo ambient technotrance psybient music project made up of Simon Posford and Raja Ram, along with a number of collaborators and guest musicians. Posford also performs under the name Hallucinogen and owns the label Twisted Records; Raja Ram — born Ronald Rothfield — is a member of 1200 Micrograms. Shpongle builds its sound on samples of eastern ethnic instruments and western contemporary synthesizer-based psychedelic music; Posford does the synth and studio work and Raja Ram the flute arrangements.

On their first album, Are You Shpongled?, released in 1998 on Twisted Records, there is a cut entitled Divine Moments of Truth. The lyrics are not profound: DMT, DMT, doo dee doo DMT, LSD doo DMT, LSD doo DMT … divine moments of truth, total and utter cosmic stuff … be here now … I love everybody. But the high sound quality, the successful mix of samples, instruments, and synths, and the progress of the music through the album made it one of the most influential releases of its time. There have been a number of remixes over the years; here is the original track:

And if you really like Shpongle — and I guess I do — here is a video of a live performance of Divine Moments of Truth at the 2001 Solstice Music Festival in Japan:

There is one more ingredient to this mix. Gnostic Media consists of Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit. They are the creators of the DVD The Pharmacratic Inquisition, setting forth what they coonsider to be the Christian persecution of archaic religions, because personal access to ecstatic states through the ingestion of entheogenic plants challenged church domination, culminating in the creation of the pharmacratic state and its current war on drugs.

Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit

They are also the authors of the book Astrotheology and Shamanism: Unveiling the Law of Duality in Christianity and Other Religions, which also addresses the persecution of entheogens and their users, and discusses the solar and mushroom symbolism that the authors believe to underly all religions, especially Christianity — very similar to the ideas put forward by John Marco Allegro in 1970 about the origins of Christianity in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. If you are interested in their theories, you can see the entire video here. But that is not why we are talking about them.

Rather, what follows is a video, entitled Divine Moments of Truth with Joe Rogan, on which we hear the words of Joe Rogan on Breuer Unleashed, remixed by Gnostic Media with added visuals, some by visionary artist Alex Grey, a remix of Shpongle’s Divine Moments of Truth, and additional words by Terence McKenna. How could it not be interesting?