Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground
Ethan Maurice
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.