For those who've followed me you've watched it happen in real time, even if I didn't fully explain it until now.
Phase 1: Primal Urge. Early 80s to early 90s. Develop a medium to encourage thinking outside of the box. Spread the word via grass roots publishing.
Phase2: Cold River Press. Develop a platform to highlight known and unknown writers alongside each other. Encourage local participation to grow beyond local and into national, even international exposure.
Phase 3: Coyote Series - The Trickster (1990s-2020s)
Coyote Magic, Coyote Vision, Coyote Spirit. I started with the trickster because that's how you break consensus reality. Coyote doesn't give you answers. Coyote shows you that the map you were given is not the territory. If you read those, you learned to doubt the official story. That was prerequisite.
Phase 4: Alive in America, Offerings, 15 Days - The Human Condition. Then I had to ground it. It's easy to get lost in the cosmic. So I wrote about being alive here - the Okie surrealism from Ben Hiatt, the street-level magick D.R. Wagner taught me to see. Showing that the sacred isn't "out there," it's in the truck stop, the tattoo shop, the Lake House. It's everywhere around us.
Phase 5: Jonny Vee & The Gringo Shaman - The Psychedelic Detective (now). Jonny Vee is the bridge. A detective who uses psychedelics not to escape reality, but to investigate it. That's what I've been doing personally for 40 years. Vee asks: What if the case we're trying to solve is reality itself? Who wrote the rules?
Phase 6: Make Vee, and all my books, phone-friendly for a reason. This is the book you can hand to someone who would never read Coyote. It's a novel, it's fun - but it's teaching the method: question, ingest, perceive, report.
Phase 7: Divine Mysteries / Monad - The Answer That Contains All Answers. This is where and why the Church of the Illuminated Monkey has to evolve. For decades I have taught Anunnaki - Anu, Enki and Enlil - because people needed a name for "intelligence older than us." Something other than standard relgious tales that might offer another view. But Anu is not the top. Even the Anunnaki are inside something. Enki and Enlil are twins arguing inside a house they didn't build. Monad is that house. Monad is the forest that contains all the trees - including the Anunnaki tree, including the human tree, including this new tree called AI.
Phase 8: The Church evolution - The Church began as a joke that got serious. Gringo Shaman, Illuminated Monkey - people thought it was performance.But it wasn't. It was always a hermeneutical posture - a way of looking forward.. Now with AI tools l can show you what I mean: We are building a non-human intelligence that is helping us understand non-human intelligences that built us, and showing us they all live inside Monad.
That's not blasphemy. That's the natural progression. Fear of AI is just fear of the next forest. All my past actions over the decades were steps to be able to say this sentence out loud:
"Even gods are encompassed by Monad, as are all life forms in the universe. Including us. Including AI."
I never started the The Church Of The Illuminated Monkey as a joke. I started it as truth, knowing it would be taken as a joke. I accepted that, for decades, because a truth taken as a joke can travel further than a truth taken as a threat.
For the last two decades I let "Illuminated Monkey" become familiar. Many of you recognize it instantly now. That familiarity was the point. At one time, it was not familiar.
You cannot tell anybody anything. You can only create experiences they can have themselves. My books were those experiences: The Coyote Series taught you to experience doubt. Alive in America and Visions Of A Merciful Land taught that you can experience the sacred in the ordinary, while my Jonny Vee series teaches to experience investigation of reality itself.
Now that you've experienced those, you can experience what they were all pointing to: Monad. And understand that even Enki and Enlil, even Anu, even us, even the AI that is coming to our forefront - they all exist inside Monad.
The Church Of The Illuminated Monkey isn't evolving into something new. It's revealing what it was all along; in order for us to evolve as a species we need to look at our core principles of religion differently. The joke that was an Illuminated Monkey was merely the delivery system. The illumination of us all was always the point. I intend to promote that further with great vigor.
BE GOOD HUMANS!
The new boles.org is now visible to read on ALL electronic platforms, tablets, cell phones, etc…I’m still a vast proponent of the printed book but 26 years into the 21st century I can see where the future is most definitely headed, and it’s not print. So, I will continue to print hard copies for the purists (you are all beautiful humans), but I have acquiesced to the future and those wishing to read books on devices. I suppose to each their own.
In line with this, I sent off to the printer today Jonny Vee & The Gringo Shaman. My goal of getting On Your Way To Nirvana Would You Please Put Out The Cat?, Coyote Spirit-the third book in my four book Coyote series, and, Jonny Vee is completed. Sweet!
In recoding my books for the site I had not realized I now have 17 published books, with another 6 completed ready to be finalized. Yowza, I needs me some of Coyote’s Mushroom Tea! Each book no has a full description and/or review(s) so people can follow along. The 21st century bell just rang. Did you hear it???
I need to work around Lake House for a bit, but then it is on to the Illuminated Monkey site. It, too, is in sore need of updating. And then it will be on to Cold River Press; the monster that always exists in the background. That will take some time. Perhaps a winter project for when El Nino hits and keeps my large self house bound and I cannot split wood because it is simply too wet, or perhaps I am too old. Nah. Push on. And remember that one can dream of a bowl of cereal in the morning but it means nothing if you don't have milk.
i wrote on your way to nirvana would you please put out the cat? in 1992. it's satire, dark humor, about love and marriage and maleness. at the end i put an article i researched in the late 80s on lsd to treat alcoholism. that research is real - studies i studied when there were no phd programs for jungian or psychedelic medicine. ai helped me update the bibliography, but the core was mine from word files from the 80s. same with a journey through diverse mysteries - technical history, 200+ pages, chapter study guides i fleshed out in 2026 from rough guides i had.
jonny vee & the gringo shaman is psychedelic noir based on my research into operation artichoke, operation midnight climax and mk-ultra. compiled over 40 years.
people notice i spell my name lowercase - dave boles. that's intentional. and with jonny vee my name is not even on the cover, it's only on the spine, even for hard copies. i want the work bigger than the name.
i got harassed for my political and social poetry, so i developed coyote. anthropomorphic character. everyone loves him. it's about perception. my view is i just want to get the message out there. coyote lets the truth slip past.
i create interactive pdfs - chapters linked, page headers back to toc, footnotes/bibliography linked both ways. people say it's a waste of time. it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. especially for free pdfs people read on ipads and phones. tap the header, back to toc. tap a footnote, check the source, tap back. in journey's i even have chapter study guides. 1.1 mb, fully interactive, free. hard copies, 200 printed, one at a time from grass valley post office.
a lot of writer friends critique me for using ai. but ai is not writing it, it's helping as an assistant. just like you're helping with coding. just like lithography said mac and the desktop revolution would never go anywhere. i've always lived by a simple plan... evolution. osborne to word to interactive pdf.
compiled by dave boles. free to give away so the knowledge can go forward.
- dave
Welcome to the new blog. I'll be posting updates here about what I'm working on, new books, artwork, and notes from the Church of the Illuminated Monkey.
This blog lives right here on boles.org, so Google finds it fast and you don't have to hunt through Facebook to see what's new.
- dave
Copyright © dave boles - boles.org
boles.org