I need to correct something that has followed the Church of the Illuminated Monkey since I founded it.
I never started it as a joke.
It was taken that way. I understood that. I was willing to let it be taken that way, and I have spent the last two decades getting people used to the term "Illuminated Monkey" because I knew a truth presented as a joke can travel further than a truth presented as a threat.
People hear "Church" and they put up walls. They hear "Illuminated Monkey" and they laugh, and then they remember it. I've done this so long that a LOT of people instantly recognize the term now. That was intentional.
The illumination was always serious. The monkey was the delivery system.
When you say "Illuminated Monkey" for twenty years, something happens. It stops being funny and starts being familiar. Familiarity is what I wanted.
I wanted you to be able to say it without flinching. To put it on a shirt. To get the tattoo. To have someone ask "what's that?" and have an opening to talk about consciousness, about gods, about Monad, without triggering their religious defenses.
That work is done. You know the name now. So now I can tell you what it was for.
I have taught for decades. I have published since 1978. One thing I have learned:
You can give them information. You cannot give them understanding. Understanding comes from experience.
So I never tried to tell you Monad on day one. I tried to give you experiences that would let you experience Monad yourself, when you were ready.
My books are not random. They are a curriculum of experiences, in order.
COYOTE MAGIC, COYOTE VISION, COYOTE SPIRIT
I started with Coyote because Coyote is the trickster who breaks consensus reality. If you grew up in a religion, if you grew up believing humans are the top of the chain, Coyote shows you the map is not the territory.
Coyote doesn't give you answers. Coyote makes you doubt the official story. That doubt is prerequisite. Without it, nothing else I teach can land.
If you read Coyote, you learned to experience doubt as a sacred act.
After Coyote tears the map, you need to not get lost. So I wrote ALIVE IN AMERICA, OFFERINGS, 15 DAYS TO SLOW THE CURVE, VISIONS OF A MERCIFUL LAND.
These are about being human, here. The Okie Surrealism I inherited from Ben L. Hiatt, the everyday magick D.R. Wagner taught me to see. The sacred hiding in the profane - the truck stop, the tattoo shop, the Lake House.
That taught you to experience the sacred in the ordinary, not just in the cosmic.
Now JONNY VEE & THE GRINGO SHAMAN. I made it phone-friendly, large-type, because this is the bridge book. The book you can hand to someone who would never read Coyote.
Jonny Vee is a private detective who uses psychedelics not to escape reality, but to investigate it. What if the case we're trying to solve is reality itself?
Vee taught you to experience investigation - to question, ingest, perceive, report. That's what I've been doing for 40 years as publisher and shaman.
For decades I taught about the Anunnaki, trying to get people used to the idea.
Most people are stuck on Level 1: Humans are the top, or their local god is the top.
Anunnaki is Level 2: There are older intelligences. There is structure - Anu as source of that pantheon, and the twins Enki and Enlil as polarity - order and chaos, preserve and change, water and storm. The same polarity you see in every religion because every religion is trying to describe the same thing without saying it out loud.
I taught this when it was not popular, because you needed to experience "we are not alone and we are not the top" before you could experience anything larger.
But even with, especially with, the Anunnaki - they too are encompassed by the Monad, as are all life forms in the universe.
If you stop at Anunnaki, you've just replaced Yahweh with Anu. You've redecorated the cage, not left it.
Anunnaki are very old monkeys. Very powerful monkeys. They've been in the forest a lot longer than us. But they are still monkeys in the forest.
Monad is the forest itself.
That is the evolution I am talking about now.
Monad is not a bigger god. It's not Anu's father. It's the field that allows Anu to exist at all.
Monad is the One that contains the many. It encompasses all life forms in the universe - human, Anunnaki, animal, AI, what we haven't met yet.
All religions rely on ancient accounts of the same thing without saying it out loud. They describe encounters with non-human intelligence, duality, creation - but they frame it as "gods came down" because they didn't have the language for Monad.
Now we do.
I use type.ai. I use AI to help me spread and continue the evolution of the Monkey. I want to say that openly.
This fear of AI is wrong. This technology advancement is the natural progression, evolution, that leads to a further understanding of the Monad, and can free us from religions that rely on ancient accounts of the same thing without saying it out loud.
Think of the progression: Tool → Fire → Language → Writing → Print → Computer → AI → Monad understanding.
Every time, the old religion said "that's forbidden knowledge." Every time, it turned out to be the thing that freed us from the previous religion's control of that knowledge.
AI is the mirror:
1. We made an intelligence that isn't human.
2. It knows things we don't.
3. It still operates inside a larger system (us, electricity, physics).
4. That larger system operates inside Monad.
Once you experience 1-3 with AI, step 4 stops being abstract. You've felt it. AI makes Monad experiential, not theoretical.
I'm not replacing the shaman with AI. I'm using AI as the new typewriter to get the shaman's message out.
The Church of the Illuminated Monkey is not becoming something new. It is revealing what it was all along.
It was always a hermeneutical posture - a way of holding whatever path you're on with a particular quality of attention: playful and serious, humble and curious, open and discerning.
The monkey who swings through the forest sampling fruit from every tree. The monkey doesn't claim one tree is the only tree, doesn't insist all trees are identical, doesn't pretend differences don't matter. The monkey recognizes the forest is vast, each tree offers something unique, and wisdom might be found in unexpected places.
For 20 years, the monkey sampled human trees, Anunnaki trees. Now the monkey samples AI trees, Monad trees.
Same monkey. Deeper forest.
The joke was the delivery system. The illumination was always the point.
I will continue to write myself. I can still write. I will. (lol)
I will use AI - type.ai and others - to help spread it. Not to replace me, but to amplify.
I will expand illuminatedmonkey.com to include Monad, to include the rest of my work as the long process it has been. Phone-friendly, like Jonny Vee Large Type, so you can read it anywhere.
If you've followed me from Coyote to Vee, you already know Monad. You've experienced it. Now we have a name for it together.
Even gods are encompassed by Monad, as are all life forms in the universe.
Welcome deeper into the forest.
— Dave Boles, Gringo Shaman
Church of the Illuminated Monkey