Director Rod Mann talks about his film “Entheo:Genesis”

ROD MANN: AWAKENING THE DIVINE WITHIN
by Elise McDonough
(excerpted from High Times October 2007)

Let's talk about the beginning of this project, before you even started
shooting. Why did you decide to make this type of movie?

It grew out of a class on altered states of consciousness I took at CIIS [California Institute of Integrated Studies] taught by Ralph Metzner. I was inspired by an interview he'd done with Peter Jennings involving a report on MDMA debunking the Ricaurte study. It was proven that MDMA was not actually tested in a study that showed brain damage as the result of Ecstasy use; instead, it was methamphetamine that produced these harmful results.

It was a very powerful piece, and it inspired us to start work on this movie that we had been talking about for a long time.

The film started out as a cataloging of the contemporary studies at UCLA, Harvard and around the world that are using entheogenic and psychedelic compounds as adjuncts to psychotherapy. We began unfolding the origins of shamanic use and added a chapter on shamanism, and then got into the use of psychedelics in indigenous cultures as rites of passage. Then we had to explain the importance of rites of passage, and then the focus of the film changed: It became more about this cycle of what went wrong in the 60s and 70s -- and
now this renaissance in psychedelic use, this resurgence.

What do you hope people will take away from this movie after they see it?

I hope there will be an experience of understanding the many ways that we all find to participate with some form of expression, whether it be poetry, hip -hop, trance dancing, surfing, race-car driving -- any of the various ways in which you can interact with the edge of tension and transcend the internal chatter. It's about honoring the many ways that we find flow, which is about being able to improvise and react in the moment, because through flow we find balance in our lives.

In many ways, this film tells the collective visions and stories of that which is ineffable to the one but tangible through the eyes of the many. So you have many different, beautifully passionate and inspiring individuals, all talking towards this same collective psyche, and about patterns in the evolution of consciousness through the origins of indigenous cultures practicing animism and shamanism, and how that influenced Western thought.

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Click here to listen to an audio podcast interview with Rod Mann on In a Perfect World