In this week’s special video release, part one of a two-part series, we take you to a lively gathering held in New York City at the studio of visionary artist Alex Grey. To ring in the New Year, Grey and WIE founder Andrew Cohen spoke to a packed, enthusiastic house about a passion central to both of their lives—creativity. Far more than just a consideration of the arts and culture, their dialogue took flight into a mind-expanding exploration of the creative principle as a fundamental force of life and the cosmos.

This forty-minute conversation is fueled by Grey’s lifelong commitment to reanimating the arts with spiritual significance and Cohen’s twenty-one-year career as a pioneering spiritual teacher and cultural philosopher. Together they speak about the evolution of life and consciousness, the unruliness of the creative process, and the extreme materialism of much of contemporary art. And along the way, they make it very clear that the human capacity for imagination and innovation resides in all of us and is the key to foreseeing—and creating—a new and enlightened culture.

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