By: Caveat Magister
Intro:
For a few years now, I’ve been experimenting in experiences. Experiences like Knights of the Round Stool and WONDER WANDER. Experiences that evoke depth, aliveness, meaning — and at their best — maybe even revelation and transformation.
When I began, I had no idea what I was doing. But through trial and error and by following intuition, started figuring some things out. Last fall, a month before the third annual WONDER WANDER, emailing back and forth with cameraman Paul Shelton, he wrote:
I like your idea of creating specific experiences for the group. It's actually pretty similar to a book I'm reading now called “Turn Your Life into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground” all about experience design.
It seems so naive to me now, but I didn’t know anyone else was doing this sort of thing. I had never head of experience design. Or psychomagic. I’d soon realize I did know of an experience the “San Francisco Underground” puts on. You probably have too. It’s called “Burning Man”… somehow I had never looked deeper into what Burning Man was about.
I ordered the book. And it turns out, all this new and interesting ground I thought I was breaking in hosting these participatory experiences had already been traversed. It was already known! Turn Your Life Into Art is a literal how-to guide for doing what I have been trying to do! People have been designing out-of-this-world experiences for decades in San Francisco. Burning Man was an eighty-thousand person gathering based on many of the same principles I thought I was discovering! I felt like a wizard inventing magic, only to discover Hogwarts already exists and enrolls eighty-thousand students each year.
If hosting deep, participatory, transformative experiences interests you, read this book. It is phenomenal, and a whole lot more than an instruction manual. Part how-to, part history lesson, and part memoir, Turn Your Life Into Art paints a picture of an underground scene that created experiences designed to blow minds, breakdown psychological barriers, and open people up to the possible. The ideas and principles are powerful and totally legit (I have spent the past few years figuring out some of this stuff on my own and have come to many of the same conclusions). The fun you can have with this stuff can change lives, including your own.
My 10 Favorite Index Cards:
“They go to bars because they want to have an experience, and more than just an experience of pleasure or friendship or dancing… they want an experience in which something unexpected can happen and they can play a role in it.”
“Chicken would tell the crowd that since this was a circus with no talent, anybody could join. They had the opportunity, tonight, before the bus left in the wee hours of the morning, to run away and join the circus. This was really happening. They could really do that, if they wanted.”
“Our personal mythologies are subjectively real to us as the laws of physics, and to the extent that they change, we’re used to them changing very slowly, over time. To have a sudden change to your inner notions of what is possible is not traumatic, even if it makes you fell vulnerable and baffled, is equally powerful, but wondrous. When effective experiences like this can leave you with the opposite of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Post-Transcendence Serenity Discovery), a sense of awe and wonder that infuses the rest of your life and that you cannot shake easily.”
“In the 21st century, religion isn’t the opium of the masses - being entertained without being engaged and challenged is.”
“And this is my bet with you: no matter how amazing Disney World can make the experience, there is no experience Disney World can create that will be as thrilling as breaking into Disney World.”
“People who don’t see their choices having an impact withdraw from the process. Once they do that, it is exponentially more difficult to reach their unconscious. Their daimonic selves will not see any growth potential in a scenario in which they do not really matter. At this point people are just putting one foot in front of the other until the experience is over and they can go home.”
“Burning Man creates infinite psychomagical gardens. Participants literally co-create a city together, based on their idiosyncratic passions, and then get to explore it. You never know what’s going to happen when you cross the street.”
“One of the reasons psychomagical experiences are so important is precisely that most of us reach a stasis point in our lives where we have taken all the kinds of risks we are able to convince ourselves to take, and are not able to convince ourselves to take the remaining risks that would be good for us. We protect ourselves with complexes, with projections, we cannot see what is standing right in front of us. Deep down we usually know what we need to do. We just buried the urges under piles of anxiety and dread masquerading as sensible fears and precautions. The urge to psychological integration gets hidden below the toxic manifestations of our inner mythology. Going through psychomagical experiences, even the absurd and silly and pointless (sometimes especially those) puts us in vulnerable positions where we would not put ourselves; it motivates our daimonic impulses to grow and self-healing to take the risks we’ve been avoiding; and makes sure our unconscious psyches are paying rapt attention.”
“Trying to make meaningful art in a society that doesn’t believe in anything requires breaking down the rigidity of specialization, the segregation of functions and activities, both within the personality and within the community as a whole. It means reintroducing the artist in his role as shaman - a mystical priestly, and political figure in prehistoric cultures, who, after coming close to death through accident or severe illness, because a visionary and a healer. The shaman’s function is to balance and center society, integrating many planes of life-experience, and defining the culture’s relationship to the cosmos. When these various domains (the human and divine) fall out of balance, it is the shaman’s responsibility to restore the lost harmony and reestablish equilibrium. Only an individual who successfully masters his actions in both realms is a master shaman.”
“That’s because Burning Man has a participatory ethos instead — everybody contributes. It is an amateur ethos which means that while some people are better at things than others there is no exclusively “professional class” who are the only people allowed to create or do certain kinds of work. That doesn’t refer to just psychomagic, but it applies there all the same: Burning Man doesn’t anoint artists as a priestly class, because it wants everybody to be doing art.”