Today's episode is kind of wild, and that comes as no surprise because today's guest is THE Alex Bogusky. Alex was creative director, then partner, then co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky and was named "Creative Director of the Decade" by Adweek in 2010. Alex led some of the most celebrated and revered ad campaigns of the last few decades. But he left the ad industry behind, and we get a glimpse into his new path in life.
You're going to want your SCUBA gear for this one... Alex dives DEEP into topics like infinite consciousness, releasing ego, love, and meditative journeys. Take notes, re-listen a few times, and let it all sink in.
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Episode Transcript
Alex: Any fear is of that egoic mindset. So fears of, maybe I wouldn't perform at work if I didn't have this drive, this separation, this need to conquer. Well, if it's a fear, it's probably not true. If it's love, it's probably true. You, you can use that as a sort of guidance.
[intro music]
Welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for being here. Today's episode is kind of wild and that comes as no surprise because today's guest is Alex Bogusky. And Alex Bogusky, if you don't know who that is, he was like THE guy in advertising. He was named the Creative Director of the Decade by Adweek, best of two thousands issue, like, he was a partner at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Yeah, he's a big, big deal in the advertising world, and he quit. He quit it all. He retired from the advertising industry. He loves riding bikes and being a dad and he lives in Boulder and this is like a very interesting conversation. And honestly, after the conversation, like, trying to define him as like, ‘oh, he is an investor, he is a business guy, he's a cyclist.’ Like, it all just kind of feels kind of trite.
So, I guess, listen to the conversation, but I think if I have to define it, I'm just gonna say, Alex Bogusky is love. I really like this guy. Check it out. It's… this is a good one.
[music]
Lisa: Alex, thank you so much for being here.
Alex: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: I'm excited to talk to you. A precursor, most of our audience is outdoor industry creatives. Some work in-house at brands, a lot of them work in editorial, and a lot are freelance creatives. So.
Alex: Nice.
Lisa: That's who you're talking to.
Alex: Good jobs.
Lisa: Fun times, yeah. Okay, so I'm curious, like, what are you, what are you doing these days? Can I just open it with that?
Alex: Yeah, I… boy, I mean, you just jumped right into it for sure. So, I gotta go back a little bit. After I left advertising, I worked for two years with Al Gore on climate. Then I did a lot of investing along the way. And then I launched a venture capital firm called Bat Shit Crazy. And I've been doing essentially that sort of investment stuff, venture stuff. And, you know, having life and stuff along the way, riding a lot of bikes. I had a lot of free time.
So there was a… well, a guy that I grew up with and raced bikes with and spent most of my life with, we were riding at, at Trestle, which is like a lift service - you know, Trestle.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: So lift service, downhill biking. And we were going through this section and it's these three jumps that my son had named the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. And he was behind me. And, you know, you can tell how someone's riding just by the sound of their tires. And it was really, you know, he was just down back siding everything. I think that last, it's a big long table. It's like 40 feet across, I think, to backside it. So it was, you know, great. I turn around and he is- I, you know, we do that section, make a few more turns. I turn around for the fist bump, and he's not there. And I start running up the trail. I find him, he's unconscious. I'm afraid to roll him over. I was trying to wake him up, but eventually I did, did roll him over and he had broken his neck and he passed away in my arms.
Lisa: Jeeze.
Alex: You asked. [laughs]
Lisa: I did.
Alex: This is the only way into this story.
Lisa: Yeah. All right.
Alex: It is the way into the story. So.
Lisa: This is your, this is like your childhood best friend.
Alex: From the time I was 12. This is a guy that, he was my brother. Like, literally one time I yelled at my parents because his family had sort of had broken up a little bit. And so he was living with us and I yelled, ‘I'm your real son!’ ‘Cause he was getting all the love, you know, and attention.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: So yeah, brother for a long time. And he… we were able to revive, start his heart, put him on a sort of breathing bag. Like, the first guy down was a trauma surgeon. I mean, within 45 seconds.
Lisa: Woah.
Alex: The first guy that showed up was a trauma surgeon, so he was, I was doing, like, clumsy CPR and he helped and we got his heart going.
And so he passed, and I was, you know, I was looking in his eyes and it's like, there's no other way to experience it. You see what's happening. And so it was a blessing ‘cause we were able to get his body back to Denver and his family was able to fly in and so he was, he was on, you know, kept alive for, for a few days, for that process.
And, you know, we've all, we all go through stuff and I've had plenty of ups and downs in life. It's, that's what it's all about. But this one, two years later, you still can't touch my neck without me flashing back to that moment, you know, and I'm not getting over it. Like, I'm just… I'm just not getting past it. And there's just a, there's just a cloud, you know, that's descended on everything.
And so I run into a friend who was a creative director at our agency and we're talking about stuff and he's a little cautious. He's cautiously moving into topics, you know, and, and I'm not like that, as you can tell. I will launch into whatever topic.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: But he's cautious, partly ‘cause he's probably still working. I'm pretty much retired, so if people think I'm crazy, so what? So he steps into this and, and eventually he starts telling me about, like, journeys that he's done with Ayahuasca. And he's just, he's, he's lit, you know, and he's in such a beautiful spot. And I didn't know, but he struggled with thoughts of suicide for a long time.
So I… I was honestly, at that point, I'm just sort of… there's a desperation within me a little bit. Like, I'd always had the tools to figure out any challenge that came. But this… I didn't have the tools. Whatever the tools that was, it was not in my consciousness. And so I was not moving. It was like being stuck. It was very much being stuck.
My mom passed. My brother Dave passed. And then I had a big accident with a concussion where I lost, not just short-term memory, but some long-term memory, jacked up my neck on some dirt jumps. And so those things became this one knot and I just couldn't undo it.
And then I thought, well, okay, if I go to South America to do drugs- and people think I'm a… I don't know. People have always seemed to think that I do drugs because I've got long hair and I live in Colorado and I moved from, you know, to Boulder… but it's not my thing, you know, no judgment about it, but it just wasn't my thing. Except with Dave. Like, you know, way when we were young, we would smoke weed together. And that was the only person I liked to do that with. But anyway, not my thing. And not my wife's thing. So if I go to South America, to trip in the Amazon, like, I don't think she's gonna be here, or it’s definitely gonna make things difficult when I get back. [laughs]
So I was looking around in Boulder… and everything exists within Boulder. But I found a guy, Daniel McQueen, and he did plant-based journeys, but he did it with a combination of his own shamanic abilities and cannabis, which… I was highly skeptical, as were other friends and, and, even afterwards, friends were skeptical, but I thought, it's not gonna hurt me. And I'm desperate. So, my wife is gonna be upset, but she's not gonna leave me. So this is a doable version. [laughs]
I go to see him and it, you know, it's… inside I'm laughing, ‘cause I'm in this, you know, little office in Boulder, eventually laying on this bed with speakers all around and doing this ritual. But if you've done this sort of thing, it's, you know, what I… what I like to say is it's not subtle. You don't wonder if you journey, like if you journey, you journey. And you don't use any words like you might use if you were high or if you were stoned. It's a completely different set of verbiage. It's a completely different experience. There's no lack of - in fact, there's so much memory. Like you remember everything almost exactly. So it's, it's a very different experience. I did that for two days with him. Five hours, two days in a row. And… it went in stages and, you know, we could, we could really talk about it probably for about a month, but the… eventually, about halfway through the day, I did a 20 minute segment of journey - at the front of which I couldn't talk about Dave without crying - and at the end of which I was like, healed. And, and it's a very different kind of healing. It feels like it goes through every cell of your body. I believe that it's a rewriting of what they call the junk DNA, the 97% that doesn't, isn't supposed to do anything, but is always changing. I doubt that nature deals in that much junk. That stuff, that stuff rewrites and it rewrites your understanding.
That was the beginning of sort of having the tool set to experience something like that passing, right? And so much more in my day-to-day experience that changed everything. And really made me just… so you asked what I'm doing, a hundred percent of what I'm doing is spiritual. Because the, this journey, it allows you to sort of poke up above the cloud cover, you know, to see where you are on the map. And my realization was, man, I'm just not that far away. Like, let's keep going because you're, it's close. And I, you know, without that, I don't think I'd have any idea.
Lisa: Okay. All right. So…
Alex: Okay. Okay. Question two.
Lisa: [laughs] I guess, like…
Alex: We're rapidly getting away from advertising but that’s okay.
Lisa: That's fine.
Alex: We can, we can bring it back. We can do without.
Lisa: No.
Alex: The only reason we work is because it's an aspect of journey, right? We work because it's a really neat tool for self-discovery. Sports, religion, and our work. That's why we're fascinated by it, I think.
Lisa: And like this podcast is about people who have radically changed their lives.
Alex: Okay. Well, this counts, then. [laughs]
Lisa: So obviously you're an apt candidate for that. So I guess my next question is like, where are you finding meaning?
Alex: Well, when you're in the egoic mindset, which is, which is this thought within the infinite mind. Boy - I mean, these questions are hard to answer, but.
Lisa: Yeah, let's do it.
Alex: Okay. We, many of us - and I believed, and I was experiencing the world as a separate entity. And it feels, when you're in that idea of separation, it feels like it's you against the world and essentially that the world is causing everything that's happening to you. Right? And - but the discovery that comes on little by little, but sometimes in big chunks, is that there really is only one consciousness. And that each of us are, - essentially, I like to… this is a three-dimensional model for something that's beyond three dimensions, but within the infinite consciousness. And we think infinite, we think large. There's also infinitely small, like, it's infinite. Within this infinite consciousness, if you think of it as a, as a river or a stream, you can look at the river and a stream and you can see, oh, look, there's a whirlpool, right? There's Alex, the whirlpool, you could point to it, but if you - and, and the tighter it is, the tighter it's spinning, the, the more that whirlpool may, you know, within consciousness, have this idea that it is not the river. It might see other whirlpools and think they're also not the river.
But if you expand to the, you know, up and out of the whirlpool towards the edges, towards the edges, somewhere it becomes really hard to tell what's whirlpool and what's stream.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: And that's, and that's how we exist within the one infinite consciousness. Or one mind. And so our decision to be separate, is something that takes- that's what a journey is. It's really just the realization that you're not separate and the realization of your innate nature.
Wait, what was your question? Because I was gonna try to…
Lisa: How are you, how are you finding meaning? Like, what are, or, yeah.
Alex: So there's not… you know, we find, I think when you're, when you think you're separate, you think you have to find meaning in an external world that you're out to change. Perfect example: I leave advertising. I've done, I- really, my whole life have been suspicious of the ego. So when I was an ad guy, I'm like, I'm not an ad guy. I know, I know all these people are trying to say I'm an ad guy. Oh, here's a Fast Company, you know, cover. And they're trying to say this and it's like, I know this stuff's not true, right?
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: But still, I didn't really have the tools to dissolve my ego. Within any of the, of the Zen and the Buddhism that I went to for those tools, I couldn't find the tools to really dissolve it. Not that I've completely dissolved it now, but, but I made pretty dismal headway, I think. And so my first thing was okay, leaving advertising full of guilt that I've accepted from my brothers and sisters. I will work with Al Gore, right? And I'll change the world. Anytime you feel like you wanna change the world, what does that mean? That means that you don't know that you are one with the world. It's like, it's the… that you need to reach into this Maya, as they call it, the illusion, as you call it. And if I could just get these people to behave, those others, if those others I could convince to behave, everything would be okay. That's… that’s where I was. It makes sense.
And so, so I set, you know, I had little kids. I'm worried about their future. This is the egoic gift that it always gives, which is constantly a projection of everything that hurts, within you. All the pain and misunderstanding that you're holding inside? Put it on something else. Put it on something external. So if you… you do have guilt, you're gonna need to make someone guilty. The only way the egoic mind - which is the body mind is, is a good way to think of it too. The only way that body mind ever feels it's innate innocence, which is true, is really through the, some, someone else has to be guilty for me to feel innocent.
Whereas… whereas the truth is you were made, you are made, you are created, you are part of one infinite source. You are innocent. And we are dreaming a elaborate and very convincing and don't-walk-in-front-of-a-bus dream. ‘Cause you will end, you know, you'll end your dream. You'll have to start over.
But we’re… we're dreaming, and that's why they call it awakening. It really is just very similar to when you wake up from… from a dream where you're sleeping. You don't hold yourself guilty for what you dreamed in the dream.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: There might be, like, really short hangover, but, but you aren't what you dreamt. And that's the truth of this illusion. Maya. What are they calling it now? A simulation, in quantum physics, they're starting to call it a simulation. A simulation. Sounds like someone else is in… you know, like a video game, someone's playing with you. I think that's a little.. I think they just didn't take illusion ‘cause it was already taken by the Hindus.
Lisa: Okay. All right. So you're not feeling it like a sep- like, okay. I think when I work with a brand and like I'm doing my job in creative,
Alex: Yeah.
Lisa: That separation allows me like an ability to, like, observe… there’s separation. I can look at something and I'm not part of it.
Alex: Well, do you know that that's true?
Lisa: I mean, right.
Alex: That's… that's interesting that that is a… that is a thought, right? And so you identify with that thought. And so you have,...you are imbibed with all the power of the… of the source that you emanate from. So your ability to create is pretty infinite.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: If you, if you have a thought and you create with that thought, you will receive that. So I think what you'd have to test, is you'd have to test the other. You'd have to test it from the other side. Can I do this job if I know that I am them?
Lisa: Uhhuh Uhhuh. I love this conversation.
Alex: And it turns out you can, there's nothing… that's one of the first things my friend I was talking to the other day, one of the first things he said - so this… I'll just skip to one thing. This, this book called The Course of Miracles. It's one of the… one of the things that I eventually stumbled on and it is like battery acid for ego. It's the… it’s an incredible teaching in exactly how to undo the ego, which is forgiveness, but it's not the egoic forgiveness. It's a different kind.
But he - I gave him this book. Actually, I didn't give it to him. I just suggested it. He bought it. Instantly, his ego said, you know, why would I, why… if everything… I forgot how he put it exactly, but… but the challenge was why would I go to work and, you know, fight to make money if all of this is an illusion? And… it's one of the first things, the ego is ingenious in throwing up reasons why the separation is actually better for you.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: And… also it's trying to get you - and again, the ego is, is not… it's not like a little demon. It's not a thing. It's a… a thought of the finite. Right? You're in the infinite consciousness.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: Within infinite consciousness, the thought of the finite comes up and boom, there's the big bang. You know, in the same - every particle comes from the quantum. It spins up very much in the same way. I was describing how a individual consciousness would, would spin up and… and it began to organize. And we've probably been at this for six to nine billion years, so, It's not a new, a new game.
The… that thought of the finite doesn't want you to, to actually - it wants you to look at everything except that original thought, of the, of maybe that, bring that into question, put that to the test, bring that into meditation, bring that into your experience and test it. Like, it doesn't want you to do that.
So, it's incredibly ingenious - in my life, you know, it showed up like this: okay, you're doing really good. You got this house and this car and, you know, this job. Dang, not really feeling, you know, satisfied. Oh, you know why? It's ‘cause you need these awards and this car and, and more houses and more… and you need fame. Did I mention fame? You're gonna want fame. And then you try that combination. So the… if you're fortunate - I think if you're fortunate, and it's probably pretty difficult to avoid. As you, as you try to come to your happiness through this idea that the happiness is outside of you and that you'll need to bring it in through certain, certain conditions, as you try that a hundred thousand different ways, a million different ways, and it never satisfies.
I mean, I remember being on stage at Cannes, winning whatever the grand Cannes is, and it was like, so quick. The… and before I could even realize that it wasn't satisfying, a new goal was slid in under my nose. And that is, that's the… that's the way of the ego. So just to, you know, circle back, it is one of the fears - when, anytime you feel a fear, any fear is of that egoic mindset. So fears of, maybe I wouldn't perform at work if I didn't have this drive, this separation, this need to conquer. Well, if it's a fear, it's probably not true. If it's love, it's probably true. You, you can use that as a sort of guidance.
Lisa: So, like, you radically have changed your life. So like, what feels in- I guess, like, what feels in alignment with this awakening of like how you spend your time? Like, are you finding yourself being outside more? Are you finding yourself just like, interested in everything around you that you used to not see before? Like, kind of what are you finding? What's coming up?
Alex: That's a good question. It is… so what's really happening, right, within that stream is that you and I, you know, and other people, are bumping up against each other. Right? Now, what that looks like, through the prism of a finite consciousness is it looks like the world that we've all sort of agreed on and operate within.
But the truth of what it is, is there's a creation happening that… that we are not, we don't perceive through the narrow band of perceptions that we have in this body. Very, very narrow, by the way, the idea that we think- you know, that we think we're perceiving everything, that's bunk. And we, even scientifically, we know that that's bunk. It's a… and I think in terms of light, we see less than 1% of all light. So we're seeing through a sliver, thinking we're seeing all that is.
And so this other thing that's happening, which is essentially consciousness, waking up consciousness, within consciousness. That's what becomes really fascinating. And to do that, you're… there's a process where you're cleansing… there is no inside and outside, but you're cleansing that… that swirl, that whirl pool that you are, right? And then when, when I see you, right, my eyes see your body. And my eyes see your couch and your “Love Anyway” sign. That's a great… that, that is it. I see that sign, but what I am… truly what I'm perceiving beyond perception is your perfect unsoiled nature. With no history, with no future, with no… and I, and I offer no guilt and I offer no judgment. And that is something that I… I couldn't do. I couldn't do that. I didn't have that. And… and so, much of my interactions with what I thought was the world - which is actually a mirror, by the way. It's always just reflecting what's inside - much of my interactions were painful because I was painting on other people what my ego needed me to paint on other people to prove its separation.
So, you know, I went through life like that. And it was gritty and it was, you know, there were sharp edges and it was light and shadow, right? It was up and down, it was very conditional.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: And I outsourced a lot of, like, meeting people. I had, you know, assistants. At times, more than one assistant, that would, you know, meet plumbers and, and mechanics and things like this. So what happens is, as that shifts within you, - and it's a back and forth process. You see it as a mirror. So when something's unpleasant, you… hopefully at some point you can catch it. At the beginning, you can't catch it, you just react. But eventually you catch it, you pause. You essentially thank whatever it is, you go inside, you find that same thing in you. You forgive it in you. You forgive it in the other. You, you forgive it within the world, and poof is gone - It's really cool by the way, that actual forgiveness is something we should teach in school, I think - it's gone.
And then your experience with the world is something I… the best way to describe it is heaven on Earth. You… it's one incredible experience after another as you interact with these beautiful unstained souls over and over and over. And so now, like, I had an assistant and, and she moved, and I didn't replace my assistant. Because there's nothing and there's no one I don't want to meet. There's no- like, when my car breaks, it's like, oh, good, I get to meet a new mechanic. Because it's not the mechanic, it's the brother. It's the brother, the sister that I get to meet. And so… that is what I spend my time doing, is having those interactions, which are often miraculous and mind blowing, and you just can't believe what's happening. It’s that, it's that beautiful coincidence that seemed to be a coincidence before, but then it starts to just be a way of life.
Lisa: Mm-hmm. Okay, so what it kind of reminds me of visually is, have you heard this thing where dogs cannot see what's on a TV screen up until like HDTVs were invented? So a dog would not have that in their eyes to be able to see anything on a screen.
Alex: Yeah.
Lisa: At all. And then once technology got better, dogs are able to see TV now.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: You know, and it's so funny that you're in the same room with, like you're in the room with a dog watching TV and the dog just sees a black surface. And, and like, what do, what do we not see that’s just around us constantly? Like, that's what that always reminds me of.
Alex: And I think what we expect, I have to say, what we expect is, you know, people talk about the third eye, and what we expect is it to come through our eyes. It doesn't come through our eyes.
Lisa: Yeah. No.
Alex: It comes through on, on a consciousness level. And so, I kept waiting for, you know, to see people glowing, and some people probably do, but they, but, but they're not really, they're just interpreting it that way. The eyes aren't, aren't picking up that sort of thing.
So, but we… you know, my dad struggled with his mental health. And at one point he was suicidal and we were working together early on, early on when I was 24. And he… just, I don't know, today, I don't know what you'd call it, but, intense depression, couldn't stop crying. Eventually, you know, was put into a psychiatric ward. And it was… I didn't notice at the time, but as we would sit there on a bench and we could look out on the world.. we were working together, we were in the same family. This family was just me and my mom and him, and, you know, everything about what should be an objective world was exactly the same. But he couldn't stop crying, facing exactly what I was facing. Right? Because what was in him and getting projected and painted on that world was attacking him. Right? And… so we've all had a similar experience to that, so that's evidence that, you know, you can use or you can deny, but the world is not objective as we like to think it is. It is… it is always being painted. It's a mirror that we're painting on. And we make a big mistake, which is, if I put on this hat, which I probably shouldn't have put on this morning, knowing I was gonna be on video, but if I put on this hat and I look in the mirror, I know if I want to change the hat, I take off the hat, right? I don't try to reach into the mirror. But what most of us try to do with our pursuit of happiness is, ‘I just need to get those people to behave better. I just need to find a better spouse. I just need to find a better job. I just need to find…’ and it's all looking out that way. If you encounter enough disaster in your life, pain, suffering, you may turn in. And I was a big proponent of, never turn in. I remember thinking this like… I remember thinking, it's just too dark. You don't want to go in there. And there's all sorts of stuff in there for sure. But… but you do, you want to turn in, you want to turn in and discover the truth of what you are. And you'll be very pleasantly surprised.
Lisa: So that's what you've been doing.
Alex: That's what I do. But… but it becomes, first you do it for yourself. You know, that's usually- that's truly the… the motivation, even when the ego is trying to be bigger than itself. It really does it through this idea of self-sacrifice. It doesn't do it through this identification with others. It does it through this idea of I will sacrifice myself for my family, for my kids, for my friends, whatever it is. And this notion of sacrifices is a misunderstanding. The… there's… there's a… within the spiritual path, it just becomes very obvious that there's no such thing as self. And so you start to want to reach others and just give them anything that is working for you, right? Because you were taught so many things that didn't work for you.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: By people that it didn't work for. By culture that it didn't work for. That… once you've got something that's working, it feels… you're just compelled, honestly. You're just compelled. And so, I would say that's… if I do anything, it's just that, it's just that.
And I don't… when I tell people I do that, they're… many people say this, ‘that's okay.’ [laughs] Like it’s… like, it's not as good as the pursuit of money, essentially, is what they're saying. That's okay. You know?
Lisa: Huh.
Alex: We are very additive in the material world. We think in terms of, you know, you look at Instagram and things like that, right? We look at like, well, how many likes did you get? How many follows did you get? How many…? You know, those things are really irrelevant within, within a oneness, within a consciousness that is, that is one consciousness. There are streams of thoughts within the consciousness, and some of those streams of thoughts are about separation. Some are about gun control. Some are about all, all these different themes of thought. They're all rubbing up against others. So there's that great bumper sticker, ‘Don't believe everything you think.’ And it's very accurate because not all your thoughts are being generated by you. Many of them are just in the larger cultural aspect of mind.
And so these things come and go. Whether you engage with them or not is… probably the biggest benefit that you can have to your planet if you wanna be a benefit, is to quiet your mind, purify your mind, and not be putting into that consciousness junk that you don't want to see manifest. Because everything begins to manifest. You know, if you… if your consciousness is about taking away guns from somebody, that is the same stream of consciousness that is about gun violence. And so you, you may not believe that and you may not want that, but until you can quiet your mind, you are manifesting that.
So I think it's… it's a huge, it's a huge service. There's been people over the millennia that have, I think, kept us from destroying ourselves. Where the majority of us within mind are so set against each other, believe that there's no gain without loss. Believe that there is loss, but you know, believe in this… lack of abundance. And essentially everything is a deal within the ego. Everything is a strategy.
And then you've got, you know, people who are in caves holding a massive elevated consciousness that are, that are, have been doing enormous work within our consciousness to, to at least keep us from tipping into, into total and absolute destruction.
So, we don't believe that because we have a experience of separateness.
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: But when you… when you start to experience the… the oneness, all the stuff that we think is so weird, like ESP, or, you know, astral travel and stuff, like, it's just… talking to people who have passed. These are… these are obvious aspects of one mind. They're not, they're not strange at all. In fact, we're just so insane that they've become strange.
Lisa: Yeah. Collective consciousness. Question, so we're all just going around projecting our shit onto each other as humans.
Alex: That's a good, yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. Everyone's just, it's like a food fight. We're all just projecting shit everywhere. So that being said, I… I always like looking at, like, things relationally and just kind of accepting, okay, what's my relationship to this right now? Or like, I don't know, does that make sense? Like, I think everything is relational.
Alex: I'm, I'm not sure I understand, but keep going.
Lisa: So I guess, you know, knowing where you're at in your journey, and that like yeah, you're gonna be projecting everything… we all do. What's your relationship to creativity at the moment?
Alex: Oh, so, relationship is an aspect of separation because you can't have a relationship unless you hold yourself separate. You know, like, so love is the, love is the dissolution of relationship. Right? True love.
Lisa: Wait, love is the disillusion of relationship?
Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa: Okay.
Alex: So… but I think if you just use the term, what's your relationship to creativity?
Lisa: Yeah.
Alex: I believe that… I believe that it's impossible not to be creative. You know, I used to have so many people say to me, how are you creative? What do you do to be creative? And, and I mean now in retrospect, it's like you just created this life that's totally not real. You're painting on yourself and on everybody else all the time, and you're creating these interactions like you're incredibly creative.
You just have buried the ideas that you're creating in your subconscious. Like, people are creating all sorts of events that they don't think they want ‘cause they're creating them from their subconscious. So creativity is like, is like… everything that's sort of fractured into a duality. If you, if you do, if you do a journey. Have you ever done a journey like a, like Ayahuasca?
Lisa: I have… I have not.
Alex: If, if you do one and you're lucky - they're not all the same, but if you're lucky, you get essentially Revelation, which is a connection up. Right? And then miracles being a connection between different whirlpools. But, but in… in that connection and that realization of that oneness, you… all the dualities of this world collapse. So the good and the bad and the pretty and the ugly and the… I don't know, gimme a… the up and the down. And… and the past and the present, all those collapse into an infinite now. A consciousness that only exists in an infinite now.
So the… and the inverse also happens. As the infinite consciousness makes itself finite and has the finite experience, all… it's like going through a prism and everything fractures into pieces, into these dualities. So one of those is, is creativity, right? What we think of as creativity, painting, filmmaking, writing poetry, right? Those are all reflections of what creativity really is as it collapses into this, into this infinite now. And, and that… that creativity is more creation. It's more the extension of love. That's the… it's the extension of love within the infinite love.
And so when we, we will have hints of it, you know, I've, I always have thought a good piece of art makes you… it gives you just this little sense of the infinite, and now I understand why I always thought that. So my relationship to creativity is that I think that I… I understand what it is and that, that it isn't about me needing to do or make anything within this. It has much more to do with potentially what may be happening right now with you or someone who's gonna listen. And it's that extension of… of the original love. It's… it's a fractal, right? It's one fractal after another. It's that lotus pedal unfolding. That's, that's all creativity… that's all, that's what creative is. Creativity being a reflection of that within the, within the material world.
Lisa: Okay. I love that.
Alex: [laughs] Okay. And there's no reason not to enjoy the reflections, right? I mean the…
Lisa: Absolutely.
Alex: Absolutely.
Lisa: Okay. My last question to you is, like, knowing who your audience is, like what is something I haven't asked you that you think is worth sharing?
Alex: Hmm. I thought you asked really… I mean, you asked normal questions, but you got unusual answers, so. [laughs] I guess this would be the only - and this, this doesn't have to do with them as an audience, really, it's just any audience. When you- we sort of just touched on it and you got ‘Love Anyway,” right. At one point in my journey, and it didn't make no sense, I had... gone through something, I had seen something. I think it was essentially right after the first healing I had with Dave's passing. And… I just said, I want to feel again. Because I, I must have… somewhere along the way said, I don't want to feel. I'm sure I did, because a lot of times the feelings that we're feeling, we don't want to feel. So… and light just started shooting outta my chest. For, it seemed like forever. It went on and on and on. And I'm thinking, what the fuck? I just said I wanted to feel. Right? This is me, a year and a half ago. Shouldn't it be coming in? Shouldn't the light be coming in? Like, I want to feel. And everything's out there. It needs to come to me.
And it just kept shooting out, shooting out. I sat up. And I looked at the shaman and he sat up and we didn't share any words and he just said, ‘whoa.’ My favorite quote, he says, ‘big medicine.’ And he… he explained what he was experiencing, which was, he said, I do this all the time. And he said that, that he himself just kept opening and opening and opening and opening and, you know, again, at the time I didn't know that there was a sort of one consciousness and that we could both be experiencing the same thing. And so that was so, so weird to me. But also so, so confirming at the time. But the… but as you, as you use forgiveness to remember what you are, you realize that you are love. And not love, like, romantic love and not love as we really, most of us have experienced it, but love as the power of creation. Love as the fuel and the engine for everything. And it's very, it's very, very powerful and very overwhelming when you, when you experience it.
But it ends the search. It ends the search for this. It's, it's like if you were, there was this, this character called Gumby when I was, when I was young, you know Gumby?
Lisa: Mm-hmm.
Alex: And Gumby was Claymation. You know, I always think of Gumby, like, looking for clay, right? That's what most of us are as humans. It's like we're looking for love when we're made of it. And so it's such a trick, right? Such a riddle. When you're set on a course to search for something that you're made of.
There's always teachers that have always been there. They're clanging, you know, they're… beating us about the veil trying to get our attention. But, we're doing our best to ignore them. But when you start to hear, you turn, you realize the teachings are everywhere. It… starts to click. So I mean, that would be the main thing for people is just to…, to test that, to know that you're… to at least put this much faith into the idea that you may be loved and begin to investigate that.
And then the other thing I would offer is my phone number because sometimes people just wanna chat about this sort of stuff. And so it's 303-718-7048 and you could put it in the… whatever the…
Lisa: Show notes, yeah.
Alex: The description or the notes. Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, this was a very different conversation than I thought we would have.
Alex: Okay.
Lisa: And I enjoyed it immensely.
Alex: I had fun too.
Lisa: Yeah. Thank you for your time and… yeah, this was cool.
Alex: It was awesome. Thank you, Lisa.
[music]
Lisa: Thank you so much to Alex for being on the podcast. That was a very different conversation than I thought we would have. I had all these questions prepared about, like, when do you know it's time to make a change and what does it feel like and how do, like, how do you know that you're gonna make a huge career shift?
Like, I, you know, we didn't talk about any of that, and I think that was for the better. So thank you for guiding that conversation in the way that you did and sharing your insight and sharing your cell phone number and, yeah, to our listeners, do what you will with that.
And if you enjoyed this podcast, feel free to leave a five star review, leave a comment, and help it get into the ears of more humans that are ready to receive it. So with that, wow, have a good day.