Program Notes
Guest speaker: Erik Davis
A talk by Erik Davis at Burning Man 2003.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Thank you. And there you can find talks given by Rick Doblin, Bruce Dahmer, Daniel Pinchbeck, Terrence McKenna, and many others.
00:00:26 ►
I’ll tell you more about Palenque Norte at the end of today’s program.
00:00:30 ►
But before we begin today’s talk, I again want to thank my friends Jock Cordell and Wells of Chateau Hayuk
00:00:36 ►
for letting us use some tracks from their Nature Loves Courage CD.
00:00:41 ►
So thank you guys.
00:00:42 ►
Now for today’s program, we’re going to be playing part of a talk
00:00:45 ►
that Eric Davis gave at the first series of the Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man.
00:00:51 ►
And the reason I say part of a talk is that we ran into some technical difficulties when Eric was
00:00:57 ►
about halfway through his talk. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly what it was. If it was the
00:01:02 ►
time the generator stopped or one of the times we had to shut down our equipment
00:01:05 ►
because a dust storm became so intense we had to seal off all the electronics in order to save them.
00:01:11 ►
Actually, I’m not sure we really did save them in the end.
00:01:13 ►
But, hey, that’s all part of what gives Burning Man its intensity, you know.
00:01:18 ►
And I know that Eric understands because in the fragment of this talk that we did manage to save,
00:01:24 ►
Eric in what is now somewhat ironically said,
00:01:27 ►
part of the experience here is about getting lost.
00:01:31 ►
And for those of you who may be waiting for our podcast of the real vagina monologues,
00:01:37 ►
I’m sorry to report that their entire presentation was lost.
00:01:41 ►
So the few hundred of you who were there know what a tragic loss that is, but oh well,
00:01:46 ►
there’s always another burn. Maybe we’ll have a revision of that unique research panel again one
00:01:51 ►
day, but I digress. Anyhow, my guess is that most of you are already pretty familiar with Eric and
00:01:57 ►
his work, but for those of you who are just now joining the tribe, I’ll give you a little background.
00:02:03 ►
In his fascinating book, Counterculture
00:02:05 ►
Throughout the Ages, R.U. Sirius describes Eric as a 21st century countercultural writer,
00:02:12 ►
and he’s definitely that, but Eric’s roots actually go way back to the end of the insane
00:02:17 ►
20th century when he broke into the mainstream culture, I think, with his book, Technosis,
00:02:23 ►
Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age
00:02:25 ►
of Information. And if you haven’t read it yet, you ought to do yourself a favor and check it out.
00:02:30 ►
I first heard of Technosis myself from Terrence McKenna, you know, and like a thousand other of
00:02:36 ►
Terrence’s overeager fans, I’d been dumping my ideas about him about the book I was working on
00:02:41 ►
at the time. And after I’d probably come close to exhausting all of his patience in his very uniquely Terence-like way, he said, if I were you, I’d read Eric Davis’s
00:02:51 ►
Technosis before you get much farther into your work. And I have to admit, it was really excellent
00:02:57 ►
advice. In fact, I wound up quoting it several times in what eventually became The Spirit of
00:03:02 ►
the Internet, which you can read online on our Matrix Master site if you want.
00:03:07 ►
And if I can ever find the time, I’ll try to put up a PDF version so you can download
00:03:11 ►
it.
00:03:12 ►
But back to Eric Davis’ work.
00:03:14 ►
After we play what’s been preserved in this 2003 Burning Man talk, I’ll give you some
00:03:19 ►
information about what Eric is up to these days, including some new books he’s written.
00:03:24 ►
And for those of you who want to cut to the chase,
00:03:26 ►
you can find out more about Eric at www.technosis.com.
00:03:30 ►
That’s T-E-C-H-G-N-O-S-I-S.com.
00:03:35 ►
And now, Eric Davis’ Palenque Norte talk at the 2003 Burning Man Festival.
00:03:41 ►
Burning Man Festival.
00:03:49 ►
All right, thank you very much,
00:03:53 ►
and thanks a lot to Lorenzo for setting this place up.
00:03:57 ►
I’ve been coming to Burning Man since 1994,
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and it seemed like there was some kind of emergent phenomenon this year where a number of these sort of lecture talking
00:04:05 ►
sharing spaces kind of emerged and I think it sort of represents certain
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maturation and perhaps devolution of Burning Man but it’s a certain phase
00:04:16 ►
that comes in where talk in the kind of community that comes about through talk
00:04:21 ►
is very important.
00:04:29 ►
And I think one of the reasons it took a long time for that to happen is because in many ways what I’m going to do today, which is to discuss Burning Man, analyze a little bit
00:04:37 ►
about how it works, some of its underlying assumptions, desires, technologies, and putting
00:04:44 ►
those in a historical context.
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Where does this come from?
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Particularly in terms of the bohemian underground,
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and particularly on the West Coast.
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So in some sense, I’m analyzing it.
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I’m being a bit of an intellectual,
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and that’s precisely against the spirit of the thing.
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And I recognize from the beginning in a way
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that I’m participating
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in what it’s almost designed not to do.
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In a way, out here,
00:05:09 ►
we avoid interpretation.
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We avoid analysis.
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We avoid over-symbolizing
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what’s going on here
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because we seek something
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fresher than that.
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In some sense,
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beliefs are a sort of after image
00:05:23 ►
of something more frenetic and more intense.
00:05:28 ►
So in a way, I kind of acknowledge from the get-go that this is already involuting, in some sense, what’s going on here.
00:05:35 ►
But it also represents, I think, a certain this insane, amazing, social, visual, virtual, psychedelic environment.
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What do we do with it?
00:05:51 ►
How do we take it from that?
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What kind of communities come out of it?
00:05:54 ►
Language and talking your way through it and pulling back the surfaces
00:05:59 ►
and finding out what’s going on beneath that is I think a valuable tactic.
00:06:05 ►
But to be a little more personal, I wrote that this is all based on a piece that I wrote
00:06:10 ►
that will be coming out in a collection called After Burn, which is kind of a neat idea.
00:06:18 ►
Essays mostly by academics, but they’re all burners, so it’s sort of an interesting kind
00:06:22 ►
of thing. I’m going to kind of go back and forth between the pamphlet that I did
00:06:29 ►
and then stop and talk about things.
00:06:31 ►
But I wanted to start out with a personal experience,
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since, of course, of all the cults I’ll be talking about,
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and by cults I don’t mean cults in the sort of negative, crazy, charismatic,
00:06:41 ►
forcing you to toe the line kind of cult.
00:06:45 ►
But I mean it in the sense that India has cults.
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Hinduism is not a single religion.
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No religion is a single religion, but Hinduism is really not a single religion.
00:06:55 ►
It’s a collection of sects and cults and mutations and malformations and appropriations
00:07:01 ►
that occur in a certain environment, share themes, share gods, but it’s a real
00:07:06 ►
chaos.
00:07:07 ►
And that’s sort of what I mean by cults, and I’m kind of pulling out a few examples of
00:07:11 ►
them, of what we see here, not in a theme park sense or a theme camp sense, but something
00:07:18 ►
a little bit more underlying.
00:07:20 ►
And the primary cult, which I’ll talk about in a bit, is the cult of experience.
00:07:32 ►
The idea of experience, of burning everything that’s in your way to get to experience, whatever that is,
00:07:40 ►
and making space for something spontaneous, unexpected, immediate, overwhelming, non-linguistic, terrifying, awesome,
00:07:42 ►
making room for that to happen. So I thought I’d set out with an experience that for
00:07:46 ►
me captured a lot of the peculiarities of my topic, which is really the question,
00:07:53 ►
how do we talk about Burning Man in terms of sacred forces, spirituality, mysticism,
00:08:01 ►
the religious impulse? It’s a very tricky question because these words are all very loaded.
00:08:05 ►
They’re all a little dated.
00:08:06 ►
They’re all a little crusty.
00:08:08 ►
You know, they get in the way
00:08:09 ►
more than they get us to where we want to go half the time.
00:08:12 ►
So it’s a tricky question.
00:08:14 ►
But this experience I had really captured something for me.
00:08:18 ►
It was last year during the Floating World Incarnation.
00:08:23 ►
So at that point, I finally got around to doing
00:08:26 ►
a schtick that I’ve been meaning to do for like five years and I dragged the stuff out
00:08:30 ►
every year and I just inevitably neglected to do it out of sloth, inertia, excess, whatever
00:08:36 ►
sorts of reasons, preventing you from manifesting all your plans on Burning Man. But basically, I just had a snorkeling gear, and I had these huge yellow duck fins.
00:08:50 ►
I mean, hilarious goofball duck fins.
00:08:53 ►
And I just went out on the playa, lay down a cheesy beach towel, and got into a full lotus position and meditated.
00:09:03 ►
So it’s like just to go out there, but really meditate,
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not just sit there to perform or be an object for people’s cameras,
00:09:08 ►
but really actually kind of to do this.
00:09:11 ►
So, you know, as a statement,
00:09:14 ►
I guess you could say I was performing my response to
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Freud’s dismissal of the mystic’s oceanic consciousness
00:09:20 ►
as an infantile resubmersion into the womb.
00:09:23 ►
That’s what Freud said.
00:09:24 ►
Mysticism is just going back into the womb, all that, melding with oneness.
00:09:29 ►
And so I was like, well, if we’re in the ocean, let’s swim.
00:09:33 ►
So I’m sitting there, and the first, I sit down, and immediately, my eyes are closed,
00:09:38 ►
I can’t really see anything.
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This woman comes around, or I found out later because I could see her, and she just happened
00:09:44 ►
to have some sage, so she blessed the space kind of instantly as later because I could see her and she sort of had just had to have some stage so she like you know blessed the space kind of
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instantly as soon as I sat down and then I kind of entered into actually would
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turn out to be a very powerful meditation very quickly very centered
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focused still letting the sound surround me but not being very aware of the
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sounds but not necessarily focusing in and identifying anything it’s one of my
00:10:04 ►
favorite ways to move through playo space, especially at night.
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Go out, close your eyes, and just move through the mix
00:10:11 ►
without grabbing on anything and see how it kind of mixes up together.
00:10:15 ►
So I was doing that in my head.
00:10:17 ►
And, you know, it was the floating world.
00:10:19 ►
And I thought, you know, one thing we’re going to see this year are a lot of pirates.
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You know, the little, arrr, matey, and, you know,
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and all sorts of varieties of that where there’s a certain kind of, you know,
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crazy, excessive, almost, you know, frat boyish punk energy.
00:10:35 ►
Using the pirate mask as an excuse to be goofy and excessive.
00:10:39 ►
And so I’m sitting there and I can hear them coming.
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Arr, arr, arr, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, arr, arr. And I’m just sitting there and I could hear them coming. I’m just sitting there. Eyes are slightly open,
00:10:48 ►
but basically I’m not seeing anything. And then suddenly I hear this. And then this pirate
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tackled me and he had this plastic knife and he like looked like, I’m sitting in a, you know,
00:11:00 ►
sitting like this, you know, so I’m like a, like a weeble, you know, I’m like
00:11:05 ►
rolling around like this and he pulls out this plastic knife and he like, you know, pretends to
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like chop my head off and he yells down my snort, you know, and he just like rolls me around a
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little bit and then he kind of just sort of popped me back up in my little place and then just ran
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off, you know, which, which just in itself I find really admirable
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because one of the things
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that doesn’t happen here enough
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is that people have their trips
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and they’re doing their trips
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and they kind of go by
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and go,
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hey, good trip.
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Hey, we’ve got a cool
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little weird thing going.
00:11:35 ►
But the kind of
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almost sort of chaotic interaction
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doesn’t always happen
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as much as it could.
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So my hat’s off to the pirate
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who just fucking,
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you know, whatever,
00:11:44 ►
just leapt in there and thrashed me.
00:11:47 ►
But the thing is, is I was sitting there.
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And what, you know, this guy probably did not know about, let’s say, there’s an image of a Mahavidya in Hindu tantra,
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where she sits there with a severed head and she’s holding her head and the blood is spurting out of her neck into her followers.
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Or he probably didn’t know about the chud practice, which is a Tibetan practice where you face the demons of the ego
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by going into nasty charnel grounds and inviting all the most terrifying, evil, scary, flesh-rending demons to take you,
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to take it of you.
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And you go into the fear, into the horror of it.
00:12:28 ►
And I was sitting there, and these resonances start to hit me,
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and I start to go, my God, what’s going on here?
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And I, you know, so I ride with it, just return to my meditation,
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and then it just opened up and bloomed,
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and I had this extraordinary, explosive, blazing kind of hit
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of this compassion and suffering and the whole kind of had this extraordinary, explosive, blazing kind of hit of this compassion
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and suffering and the whole kind of, you know, thing.
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But I’m sitting there in these ridiculous duck flippers with a, you know, a snorkel
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on and I’m crying so the snorkel’s filling up and all these goofballs are coming by and
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taking photographs of me.
00:13:00 ►
So I’m having this like totally juxtaposed moment of the sacred and the absurd. And that’s
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in many ways where the sacred is here. It’s not in the sacred. It’s in this juxtaposition. It’s in
00:13:13 ►
this kind of space in between. And that was, you know, for me, very inspiring moment. So when I
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saw that this year was beyond belief, I was very, very excited because I was always been like, that’s sort of the side of Burning Man that’s always referred to.
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And yet we’re not really sure what do we mean? Are we really doing something sacred here?
00:13:32 ►
Are we not doing something sacred here? And it’s really hard to say. You go around and
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ask people, you know, a third of the people say, yeah, this is really part of my whole
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like, you know, exploration of myself what what the cosmos means and what the forces
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are that are driving history and how none of the people are saying fuck no man i’m here for this
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is great i’m you know i’m partying i’m getting wild i’m getting right i’m not interested in any
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of that kind of stuff and all these ranges in between so how do you talk about it and so the
00:13:59 ►
way i tried to approach it was to look at certain aspects of the burn and kind of peel back the
00:14:06 ►
layers and try to understand kind of where they come from, because everything has a history. And
00:14:11 ►
out here we sort of celebrate a certain kind of lack of history, or we sample history in such
00:14:16 ►
bizarre fragments that it detaches it from the kind of more organic, settled, structured kind
00:14:22 ►
of way in which we usually think of ourselves as whatever,
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Americans or Californians or artists
00:14:28 ►
or all the ways that we tell stories that organize our subjectivity.
00:14:32 ►
Out here it gets all mixed up.
00:14:33 ►
But there’s history here too.
00:14:35 ►
This didn’t emerge out of a void.
00:14:37 ►
And so that was sort of the way I’m talking about.
00:14:40 ►
So most of what I’ll do now is just pick a few of what I’m calling cults
00:14:44 ►
and then put
00:14:45 ►
them in a little bit of historical context.
00:14:48 ►
And the reason I think that’s an important thing to do is because especially in the highly
00:14:52 ►
fragmented, mixed up, sample-delic, excessive information overload environment we live in,
00:15:00 ►
it’s very, very easy to, well, get lost.
00:15:03 ►
And a lot of this experience here is about getting lost and then finding something that’s
00:15:08 ►
maybe not yourself, but you’re finding something and then you get lost again.
00:15:12 ►
And historical resonances, understanding where things come from, that there are traditions,
00:15:17 ►
underground traditions, more secret traditions, people who are doing the same kinds of things,
00:15:22 ►
I think is a really marvelous way to sort of orient yourself in the midst of the chaos that comes along.
00:15:30 ►
So as I said, the first and sort of most primal cult here is what I’m calling the cult of experience.
00:15:45 ►
On this year’s website, the first line was Larry Harvey’s idea.
00:15:53 ►
Beyond belief, beyond the dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical ideas of religion, there is immediate experience.
00:15:57 ►
Now, that’s a powerful idea, but I’ve got to tell you something.
00:16:05 ►
At this point in the history of Western consciousness, of global consciousness, that idea itself is a belief.
00:16:07 ►
That’s a belief.
00:16:09 ►
And that’s not necessarily an unproductive belief,
00:16:10 ►
but it’s a belief.
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It’s a construct.
00:16:13 ►
And it’s another one that we work within.
00:16:16 ►
So one of the ways I was getting asked,
00:16:17 ►
like, oh, yeah, there are some, like, we say, oh, we don’t have any dogmas here.
00:16:20 ►
We’re all open.
00:16:20 ►
Yeah, but there are some things
00:16:21 ►
that we really take seriously.
00:16:23 ►
And one of those is about staying really true to experience and coming back, you know, to experience. On the most basic level,
00:16:31 ►
the cult of experience makes itself known through a continual parade of intense and not altogether
00:16:37 ►
pleasant physical sensations. The brain numbing heat, port-a-potty stink, crusty snot, the dry
00:16:43 ►
cracked feet. These offer continual reminders to you and
00:16:46 ►
your body that something is definitely going on here. The cult also manifests itself in the
00:16:52 ►
pervasive mode of seduction, the blinky light or exotic body or hilarious schtick that seeks to
00:16:59 ►
distract you from whatever goal or concept you were writing in order to draw you ever more deeply into the wildfire of energetic activity
00:17:07 ►
blazing in the here and now.
00:17:09 ►
Burning Man, in this sense,
00:17:10 ►
represents the ultimate attention economy.
00:17:13 ►
What participants exchange are the willingness
00:17:15 ►
and the opportunities to submit to new experience.
00:17:20 ►
These experiences, in turn, create stories
00:17:22 ►
which become the coin of the realm,
00:17:24 ►
fetishes traded over the fire,
00:17:27 ►
always pointing to the mysterium tremendum of consciousness itself.
00:17:31 ►
And what the thing I wanted to talk about is that in a way, that’s sort of the battle or the trick or the puzzle that we face,
00:17:40 ►
especially as Burning Man ages.
00:17:42 ►
If you’ve been here for numbers of burns, you see the way that certain things become solidified, inevitably. Routines become established, ways of
00:17:50 ►
communicating, people bring back the same camps, they have the same schticks. And so it’s this
00:17:54 ►
weird kind of battle of like, how do you create a space for genuine novelty so astonishment can
00:18:00 ►
crack back in again, instead of just relaxing into the mode that has already happened.
00:18:05 ►
And that’s this kind of constant desire to crack open and go back to experience.
00:18:10 ►
But experience itself, the idea of experience being a spiritual good,
00:18:17 ►
is itself a very powerful and very strong idea in American religious history.
00:18:22 ►
And not just in bohemian freak world, but in American religious history,
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it’s a powerful idea.
00:18:27 ►
I was enormously overjoyed
00:18:29 ►
when we came into the playa.
00:18:31 ►
And I don’t know how many of you
00:18:32 ►
read the quotes as you came on in.
00:18:34 ►
And a lot of those quotes
00:18:35 ►
are precisely the kind of people
00:18:37 ►
that I’ve been talking about
00:18:39 ►
in this pamphlet that I wrote about.
00:18:42 ►
William James,
00:18:44 ►
Gary Snyder,
00:18:45 ►
other California figures,
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Robinson Jeffers, Krishna Murthy.
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There are a lot of these figures
00:18:51 ►
who are themselves concerned with this question
00:18:54 ►
of how you make experience
00:18:56 ►
rather than dogma or rather than religion
00:18:59 ►
the kind of heart of what it is you’re after.
00:19:02 ►
And so, you know, when William James
00:19:04 ►
a hundred years ago writes The Varieties of Religious Experience, I mean, it is you’re after. And so, you know, when William James, a hundred years ago,
00:19:05 ►
writes the Varieties of Religious Experience, I mean, it was a bombshell. It was nobody,
00:19:10 ►
nobody had thought that way before. He was the first person to say, hey, we have to take
00:19:14 ►
consciousness, the subjective unfolding of experience, as a primary center of where we
00:19:21 ►
understand what’s going on with the world, with the self, with the mind. And that when you come to talking about religion, even like
00:19:30 ►
real religion, capital R, holy rollers with their snakes, whatever,
00:19:35 ►
in those kinds of religious forms, you can’t always just look at the dogma, at
00:19:41 ►
the belief system. As freaks, we tend to be very, very wary of belief systems.
00:19:47 ►
We think, ah, that’s precisely the trap.
00:19:50 ►
And yet in all religions, there is cores of experience.
00:19:54 ►
And those experiences then become shaped and narrated by the forms of the religion.
00:19:59 ►
So that at the core of the Christian revivals that raged across the United States in the middle of the 19th century,
00:20:08 ►
people were going apeshit.
00:20:10 ►
This was not even just the, oh lordy, I’m there.
00:20:12 ►
They were rolling in the ground, they were frothing at the mouth, they were having basically epileptic fits.
00:20:17 ►
So they’re having these tremendously explosive altered states of experience.
00:20:22 ►
And then those states of experience, which are opened up,
00:20:25 ►
become reconnected to a belief system, a dogma, a ritual system, a set of authorities and
00:20:31 ►
institutional structures. And that’s a lot of what happens with religion. It’s not just
00:20:36 ►
mindless zombies who are believing things in order not to face the void at the heart of it all.
00:20:42 ►
A lot of them are people who have found themselves there through experience that then becomes organized
00:20:47 ►
through a story.
00:20:49 ►
And in a lot of ways, I think what we do here at Burning Man
00:20:51 ►
is that we are aware of the constructed nature
00:20:56 ►
of the frame which we inevitably build
00:20:59 ►
around our experience.
00:21:00 ►
We have these open, wild experiences,
00:21:03 ►
and then we play with
00:21:05 ►
structures. Well, this might be, you know, a Shiva lingam here. So this is just the resonance,
00:21:10 ►
God, religion. And then you’re like, yeah, but it’s just some guy put some, you know,
00:21:14 ►
plaster of Paris or some blinky lights over here and it all kind of falls apart. So it’s
00:21:19 ►
like we’re constantly riding this line between form or construction or narrative
00:21:25 ►
and this sort of void of experience
00:21:28 ►
and bringing ourselves constantly back to that kind of intensity.
00:21:35 ►
If William James is kind of the intellectual or religious historian
00:21:40 ►
who kind of sets up in the motion which we’re experiencing,
00:21:43 ►
and by the way, we must recognize William James as a core ancestor,
00:21:48 ►
not simply because he started to say,
00:21:50 ►
hey, you’ve got to look at all these weird states of consciousness that people are in
00:21:53 ►
and start taking him seriously.
00:21:55 ►
But the man put his neurons on the line.
00:21:59 ►
He huffed the nitrous, he huffed the ether, and he puked on peyote.
00:22:03 ►
So he was doing it.
00:22:04 ►
He was testing it.
00:22:05 ►
It wasn’t necessarily his core.
00:22:08 ►
He’s got really, really funny writings on nitrous.
00:22:10 ►
Really, really good stuff.
00:22:12 ►
But the other really important kind of predecessor here is,
00:22:16 ►
let’s just call it the 60s spiritual counterculture
00:22:20 ►
in a way that’s kind of a very vague, easy term to overuse.
00:22:25 ►
But there’s a lot of ways of talking about what happened in the 60s.
00:22:28 ►
And the thing that I’m kind of really interested in
00:22:31 ►
is that whatever people were believing about what was happening,
00:22:35 ►
whether the revolution was coming,
00:22:37 ►
whether psychedelics were the gateway to a transformed civilization,
00:22:41 ►
whether the Hindus always had the message and now are bringing it in,
00:22:45 ►
whether Zazen was the way,
00:22:47 ►
whatever their belief systems were,
00:22:49 ►
what was actually happening
00:22:51 ►
was an explosion
00:22:52 ►
of alternative consciousness technologies.
00:22:55 ►
And by technologies,
00:22:56 ►
I don’t just mean material technologies
00:22:58 ►
or electronic technologies,
00:23:00 ►
although there were lots of those,
00:23:01 ►
more on that in a bit,
00:23:03 ►
but also techniques,
00:23:06 ►
techniques of the body.
00:23:10 ►
So you enter into yoga not because you necessarily have a belief about becoming a yogi or becoming enlightened,
00:23:12 ►
and maybe you even have those beliefs
00:23:13 ►
because people around you believe them.
00:23:15 ►
But what’s really going on is you’re changing
00:23:17 ►
your neuro-bio-etheric internal state by practicing,
00:23:23 ►
by doing practices.
00:23:25 ►
And so what you have in the 60s
00:23:27 ►
is this generation
00:23:28 ►
exploding and exploring
00:23:30 ►
as many practices as they fucking could
00:23:32 ►
to find other states of consciousness.
00:23:35 ►
Now it’s no accident
00:23:36 ►
that this was the generation
00:23:38 ►
that grew up in the post-war boom,
00:23:41 ►
in the realm when television entered the home,
00:23:44 ►
transistor radios, when they hit the 60s, they get the pill.
00:23:47 ►
There’s a distribution of alternative media technologies.
00:23:50 ►
Very powerful.
00:23:51 ►
There’s the whole earth review world, the whole earth catalog,
00:23:55 ►
where all the stuff in order to build your new life.
00:23:58 ►
Like a lot of back to land wasn’t just eco-romanticism.
00:24:01 ►
It’s like, how do we actually get back and build things that are going to work in a different way?
00:24:06 ►
Like there was a famous commune near Taos, New Mexico, called the Reality Construction Project.
00:24:13 ►
Which I think really captured that spirit.
00:24:16 ►
That like, we don’t know exactly what we’re doing.
00:24:18 ►
We want something really good to happen.
00:24:19 ►
But we got a lot of tools.
00:24:21 ►
And let’s check out the tools.
00:24:23 ►
And, you know, things happen, this and that,
00:24:25 ►
the 70s, a lot of different stuff we can go into about what happened with that kind of
00:24:29 ►
spiritual impulse, where those spiritual technologies wound up. But in a lot of ways, they wound
00:24:34 ►
up in this, this is an aspect of this kind of environment. I mean, the New Age, the Statu,
00:24:38 ►
brain machines, all sorts of things are coming out of this impulse that, hey, we can use
00:24:43 ►
techniques, we can use technologies, and whatever else they’re going to do,
00:24:47 ►
they’re going to deliver altered states of consciousness.
00:24:50 ►
And those are points of meaning, points of reference, points of confusion,
00:24:53 ►
places where we dissolve ourselves and see what comes out the other side.
00:24:57 ►
And in a way, what we have here is an extraordinary celebration
00:25:00 ►
of the vast multitude of these technologies of altered states of consciousness.
00:25:07 ►
And that is one way in which we kind of carry on this tradition, even though it doesn’t
00:25:13 ►
look like a tradition in terms of, you know, there’s these guys who did this one thing
00:25:18 ►
and we’re doing exactly the same kind of thing.
00:25:19 ►
But there are some really, really important, fascinating kind of practices.
00:25:24 ►
are some really, really important, fascinating kind of practices. And I think the one that I’m most sort of into invoking at this point is Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
00:25:32 ►
To put Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in question is you go like, okay, the Merry Pranksters,
00:25:37 ►
West Coast situation, Ken Kesey’s in Stanford in the late 50s,
00:25:43 ►
starts going over to the government-sponsored
00:25:47 ►
medical research facility and starts doing these funny drugs because the government’s
00:25:50 ►
really interested in these funny drugs.
00:25:52 ►
And some other characters start doing this, and so they explore the psychedelic space,
00:25:57 ►
and then they get really wild, really crazy.
00:26:00 ►
I mean, basically, I have one line here, I’ve got to pull it out here. The 60s does not get more Burning Man than the idea of a gas-guzzling art car
00:26:09 ►
driven by a macho meth head hurtling down mountainsides with festooned crazies,
00:26:14 ►
shooting film and barking bullhorn commentary through squealing speakers strapped to the roof.
00:26:21 ►
And that was basically the Prankster’s Bus Further, which crossed the country.
00:26:24 ►
And they had the kind of
00:26:25 ►
wild, chaotic, spontaneous,
00:26:28 ►
raw energy that we see here.
00:26:31 ►
So it’s like,
00:26:32 ►
it’s an interesting question.
00:26:33 ►
Is it spiritual?
00:26:34 ►
Is it religious?
00:26:35 ►
Is it mystical?
00:26:36 ►
Mm, hard to say.
00:26:37 ►
When the Kesey and the pranksters,
00:26:39 ►
when they were on that
00:26:40 ►
first big bus trip,
00:26:41 ►
they went east to go to Millbrook,
00:26:44 ►
which at that time
00:26:44 ►
was the mecca
00:26:45 ►
of psychedelic culture in the United States.
00:26:48 ►
It’s where Tim Leary and Ram Dass
00:26:52 ►
and all those characters,
00:26:53 ►
Ralph Metzner,
00:26:54 ►
all sorts of people set up
00:26:55 ►
and they were bringing all sorts of people in
00:26:57 ►
and really checking stuff out.
00:26:58 ►
And that’s where they really had the idea
00:27:00 ►
of set and setting.
00:27:01 ►
But the Millbrook people
00:27:02 ►
were really into spirituality.
00:27:04 ►
So they said,
00:27:04 ►
look, we can take the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead idea of set and setting. But the Millbrook people were really into spirituality. So they said,
00:27:09 ►
look, we can take the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a map of the psychedelic world. It’s a map of the other worlds. And so they took their religion really kind of
00:27:14 ►
seriously in a way as a map to explore these new psychedelic spaces. Then the praisers showed up
00:27:20 ►
and it was like oil and water. Those guys did not get along very well. That was all way too stuffy for them,
00:27:26 ►
way too academic,
00:27:27 ►
way too kind of poofed up.
00:27:30 ►
And so what we have here in the West Coast,
00:27:32 ►
and this is a West Coast baby that we’re in,
00:27:35 ►
in many ways a California baby,
00:27:37 ►
is that kind of psychedelia
00:27:39 ►
where you go, you know,
00:27:41 ►
whatever we’re really looking for
00:27:43 ►
in that spiritual map,
00:27:45 ►
in that spiritual model, in that God form, in that ritual operation,
00:27:49 ►
is something raw and chaotic and open-ended and scary and awesome.
00:27:53 ►
And what we do as reality constructors is to set up environments where that can be the case.
00:28:01 ►
And so the pranksters did a lot of stuff
00:28:06 ►
about setting up these kind of chaotic
00:28:08 ►
kind of environments.
00:28:10 ►
And of course I probably won’t be
00:28:11 ►
sort of blowing anyone’s mind by saying
00:28:14 ►
that in many ways
00:28:15 ►
Burning Man represents the sort of
00:28:17 ►
leading edge, it’s a bad word,
00:28:19 ►
the ultimate petri dish, whatever you want
00:28:22 ►
to call it for contemporary
00:28:23 ►
psychedelic culture.
00:28:25 ►
And it’s as if the feedback loops
00:28:28 ►
between the external environments
00:28:32 ►
and the internal space
00:28:33 ►
are getting faster and weirder
00:28:35 ►
and more opened up.
00:28:37 ►
So like with pranksters in the 60s,
00:28:41 ►
you know, they did a lot of the same stuff.
00:28:42 ►
They raided thrift stores,
00:28:44 ►
dressed up in crazy costumes that sampled all sorts of subcultures and times and places.
00:28:49 ►
They got as much fucking technology as they could.
00:28:51 ►
Old shit stuff that we just laugh at.
00:28:54 ►
Set up multiple speaker connections, you know, crazy light shows, show lights everywhere.
00:28:59 ►
Make a chaotic kind of environment.
00:29:01 ►
Throw people in there on lots and lots of drugs, and just see what happens.
00:29:05 ►
You know?
00:29:06 ►
And now, like, the drugs are a little bit, you know, we have a different range, different
00:29:09 ►
variety.
00:29:10 ►
There’s research chemicals that you can continue to tweak, and our light technology is, like,
00:29:14 ►
you know, exploding like mad.
00:29:15 ►
But in a way, we’re continuing the same kind of process.
00:29:19 ►
You know, the context has changed, but the environment is very similar.
00:29:26 ►
Let’s kind of finish the little sort of psychedelic section again
00:29:28 ►
as I come back to this question of spirituality.
00:29:31 ►
It’s one of the most vexed and kind of persistent issues
00:29:35 ►
in Western psychedelic underground is,
00:29:38 ►
are these things spiritual tools or not?
00:29:42 ►
For some people, that’s it.
00:29:43 ►
That’s their way in, and that’s even where they stay.
00:29:47 ►
Or then you have people who, like, blow their minds out on LSD,
00:29:50 ►
and then they get into, you know, Zen,
00:29:52 ►
or then they get into Hinduism or whatever,
00:29:53 ►
and that’s their kind of route in.
00:29:55 ►
But then there’s a whole other set of people who are like,
00:29:57 ►
you know, it’s interesting.
00:29:58 ►
It’s sort of another weird thing in the mix,
00:30:01 ►
but it’s not necessarily very spiritual.
00:30:04 ►
And what’s interesting about,
00:30:05 ►
and one of the things I very much admire about Burning Man is the way that it makes space
00:30:09 ►
for both those kinds of approaches. It allows you to experience the profundity that may
00:30:16 ►
arise from the simple, plain, and maybe somewhat disappointing fact that it’s really just simply
00:30:22 ►
neurons in your brain getting tweaked by little little molecules that are bouncing around and playing with your perceptual system as if it
00:30:29 ►
was a mixer well i can bring up the gain on this one kind of do the flange on that and then a lot
00:30:34 ►
of the stuff we see around here is doing the same thing with technology back so you’re like oh i’m
00:30:40 ►
in a flange loop here where it’s playing with my tweaks, echoing double image,
00:30:45 ►
and it’s taking advantage of that to do some trick,
00:30:48 ►
and that’s fun, so we get these kind of feedback loops.
00:30:51 ►
You know, I’m sorry to say,
00:30:52 ►
but that might just be this kind of empty, flipping, weird machine
00:30:55 ►
that offers no real transcendence.
00:30:58 ►
And yet, at the same time, the gods always come back.
00:31:02 ►
They have some way of continually to reassert themselves,
00:31:05 ►
and I mean that in the broadest, most undogmatic sense, or the spirituality,
00:31:10 ►
or the call of transcendence, and the ability to be in between those and to have both of those as
00:31:16 ►
possibilities so that you’re sitting there and having this, you know, deep, amazing, you know,
00:31:20 ►
heart-rending consciousness all being experienced while all this corny stuff is happening all around you
00:31:27 ►
and, you know, pirates are tackling you and all that.
00:31:30 ►
That is, in many ways, that’s the point where we’re moving.
00:31:34 ►
That’s where the spiritual, that’s where we can leave a lot of the drudgery and the dregs and the bad ideas
00:31:40 ►
and the institutional errors of conventional religion or conventional spiritual trips kind
00:31:47 ►
of behind.
00:31:48 ►
But it’s a tricky path.
00:31:50 ►
It’s a tricky path.
00:31:51 ►
A lot of dark spaces to find your way in out there.
00:31:55 ►
So it’s a real interesting space that way.
00:31:58 ►
I was talking a little bit about the light technology.
00:32:04 ►
And for this one, if you don’t mind,
00:32:06 ►
I’m just actually going to read it
00:32:07 ►
because I think kind of of all the little bits I did,
00:32:10 ►
I think it’s the one that’s the most interesting
00:32:11 ►
in terms of giving you some context
00:32:13 ►
for the kinds of things that are happening
00:32:15 ►
with the technology around here.
00:32:19 ►
So in his 1970 media-free classic,
00:32:22 ►
Expanded Cinema,
00:32:24 ►
Gene Youngblood defined his era as the paleo-cybernetic age.
00:32:28 ►
Pumped up on Marshall McLuhan and the cult of experience,
00:32:31 ►
Youngblood sensed a new phase of culture and humanity emerging,
00:32:35 ►
one that unleashed the liberating power of archaic consciousness
00:32:38 ►
into a technological society whose growing understandings of cybernetic systems,
00:32:43 ►
cognitive, technological, anthropological,
00:32:46 ►
was laying the groundwork for radical change. Youngblood saw the paleo-cybernetic age reflected
00:32:51 ►
in the media experiments he talks about in his book. So he talks about all the light shows,
00:32:56 ►
he talks about all the expanded cinema, people creating great big balls where they’re projecting
00:33:01 ►
images on it, the kind of stuff that you eventually see watered down and kind of more or less commodified and commercialized in the kind
00:33:09 ►
of hippie light show scene. But it comes from things that are much more sort of earlier
00:33:14 ►
and obscure than that. I think one of the most interesting ones in California history
00:33:20 ►
is in the late 50s, these two cats named Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson.
00:33:30 ►
They were the first people to do planetarium shows.
00:33:34 ►
So they had the planetarium in 1957, and they had like 300 speakers all around in this kind
00:33:40 ►
of dome like this, and they did a whole huge array of like I think it was about 250 projectors and
00:33:45 ►
their projectors going through prisms and you know they were playing mostly abstract film mostly
00:33:50 ►
abstract cinema and it’s like what’s going on there and what you have is this very kind of
00:33:55 ►
west coast appreciation both for this chaotic kind of wild undetermined space and a real
00:34:03 ►
appreciation of the alternate consciousness
00:34:06 ►
available in media technology.
00:34:08 ►
Because the way that media technology has functioned, particularly on the West Coast,
00:34:12 ►
has been very different than other places in the industrialized world, where a lot of
00:34:17 ►
the spirit is we just get our hands on the stuff and really start playing it together.
00:34:22 ►
So a lot of the kind of light show stuff comes here.
00:34:24 ►
There’s light shows in San Francisco that really does that. And we’re really part of it together. So a lot of the kind of light show stuff comes here. It’s light shows in San Francisco
00:34:26 ►
that really does that.
00:34:27 ►
And we’re really part of this line.
00:34:29 ►
It emerges from that.
00:34:30 ►
And I’m not being parochial,
00:34:31 ►
saying there’s all sorts of people
00:34:32 ►
doing stuff all over the world.
00:34:34 ►
And Gene Yavmo’s book
00:34:35 ►
is full of all sorts of stuff.
00:34:37 ►
But there was definitely
00:34:38 ►
kind of a core power here,
00:34:40 ►
what Belson called his place,
00:34:42 ►
a pure theater appealing directly
00:34:44 ►
to the senses,
00:34:45 ►
to that sense of immediacy. And, you know, one of the more kind of sort of developments
00:34:54 ►
that come out of that is the sort of visuals you see at raves. Like rave culture was really
00:34:59 ►
a place where a return to that kind of light technology, the projection technology happened,
00:35:06 ►
but in a different key.
00:35:09 ►
In that situation, we move very noticeably from an analog to a digital form.
00:35:12 ►
And all of us here must be very, very conscious
00:35:14 ►
of the qualitative difference
00:35:16 ►
between moving between an analog and a digital form.
00:35:19 ►
One of the sad things, though,
00:35:20 ►
is that the role of fire has changed so drastically in Burning Man.
00:35:27 ►
And it’s kind of a boring and sort of easy game to go, well, you know, back in the day…
00:35:34 ►
But back in the day, fire had a much mightier kind of power because one of the things you’re
00:35:41 ►
always sort of… At once we’re producing here and trying to avoid
00:35:46 ►
is the spectacle, the society of the spectacle.
00:35:52 ►
Society of the spectacle is the society we live in out there
00:35:55 ►
where there’s these concocted, virtualized images,
00:36:00 ►
hard sells, advertising,
00:36:02 ►
creating these kinds of environments to distract us,
00:36:05 ►
to, you know, in some ways teach us, sometimes they’re marvelous,
00:36:09 ►
but a lot of times it just gets a bit much.
00:36:11 ►
And out here we have kind of a parallel.
00:36:14 ►
It’s like we image it and break it down at the same time.
00:36:16 ►
Image it and break it down.
00:36:18 ►
And what’s happened with fire, and for reasons that are completely understandable,
00:36:23 ►
that make absolute sense in
00:36:25 ►
terms of the organic development of the event, is that fire has become more of a spectacle.
00:36:31 ►
Whereas, you know, back in the day, my first burn, that thing fucking fell, and it was
00:36:36 ►
just toxic, burning, hand-burning, hair-burning madness, you know, I mean, it was just in
00:36:44 ►
the house.
00:36:45 ►
And you can’t sustain that kind of openness.
00:36:47 ►
You can’t do that.
00:36:48 ►
So that we develop a very different kind of relationship to fire.
00:36:52 ►
So fire becomes sort of integrated into this whole realm,
00:36:55 ►
and it’s the light technology that’s really kind of pushing in a lot of ways now,
00:37:00 ►
even though in many ways my favorite things are still things that use fire.
00:37:04 ►
It’s amazing how much fire can trump the most amazing blinking light array.
00:37:08 ►
All you need is one little burst and you’re there.
00:37:13 ►
Two more cults to go.
00:37:16 ►
Next one is called the cult of juxtapose.
00:37:20 ►
What I mean by the cult of juxtapose is basically a collage effect.
00:37:26 ►
You know, collages as art are a distinctly modern 20th century phenomenon.
00:37:32 ►
Of course, people have been collaging things forever.
00:37:34 ►
But as an idea of like, let’s take, let’s appropriate chunks of other stuff,
00:37:39 ►
stick it together, see what happens.
00:37:42 ►
And one of the effects that collage can produce is this thing that I’m calling juxtapose,
00:37:47 ►
which is where you have two elements that are slammed up against one another,
00:37:50 ►
but they don’t really synthesize.
00:37:53 ►
They kind of crackle with each other.
00:37:55 ►
And there’s something about that crackle, that little mind jump,
00:37:59 ►
where you’re not sure which frame to read it in,
00:38:02 ►
that is really, really at the core of the aesthetics here.
00:38:06 ►
And again, because I’m going to forget a lot of stuff, I’m going to go try to grab a little
00:38:09 ►
bit of it here as I’m reading.
00:38:13 ►
Oh, this is a good little part here.
00:38:15 ►
All right.
00:38:18 ►
One often hears Burning Man dismissed as a theme park, but what’s important is that it
00:38:22 ►
contains thousands of theme parks.
00:38:25 ►
Little pocket universes, budding heads.
00:38:28 ►
Space-time itself seems to morph into a flea market, a masquerade of memes,
00:38:33 ►
or the Mos Eisley spaceport from Star Wars.
00:38:36 ►
Even though many of Burning Man’s camps and costumes are, in themselves,
00:38:39 ►
devoted to a particular theme, the bayou, bed of wounds, octopi, whatever,
00:38:43 ►
these elements inevitably crisscross in the turbulent, constantly flowing serendipity
00:38:48 ►
of playa life.
00:38:50 ►
Here, juxtaposition is revealed as the basic formal operation of synchronicity.
00:38:55 ►
Synchronicities happen when juxtapositions leap and make some new third thing happen,
00:39:00 ►
as two apparently unrelated events or elements suddenly form a secret link that
00:39:06 ►
a secret link that that i can’t believe we didn’t get the whole thing but all is not lost you know
00:39:14 ►
if you google eric davis and that’s eric with a k and in quotes you’ll get at least uh at least
00:39:20 ►
20 000 more hits than you can handle i think the best place to begin is Eric’s personal website,
00:39:26 ►
which, as I said earlier, is technosis.com.
00:39:29 ►
00:39:34 ►
There you can find more information about some of Eric’s books,
00:39:38 ►
including a new one from Continuum, which he wrote about Led Zeppelin.
00:39:42 ►
Also, Eric has a new book scheduled for publication
00:39:46 ►
in the spring of 2006 by Chronicle Books. Personally, I’m really looking forward to
00:39:51 ►
this one. It’s titled The Visionary State, A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape.
00:39:58 ►
I understand that this book is going to be a photo-illustrated history of California’s
00:40:02 ►
alternative spirituality. To be honest, I don’t know anyone but Eric who would be courageous enough to tackle that story.
00:40:09 ►
I’m sure he’s going to educate, entertain, tickle, amuse, and probably piss off almost everybody.
00:40:15 ►
After all, isn’t that what a countercultural writer is supposed to be doing?
00:40:19 ►
Anyway, you ought to go to Technosis.com and check out some of Eric’s writings.
00:40:23 ►
He’s put quite a few of his
00:40:25 ►
essays online, actually, and also provides links to some of his more famous pieces that he wrote
00:40:29 ►
for Wired Magazine. On a personal note, I want to say that without Eric’s help, the Blanque Norte
00:40:36 ►
conversations probably would never have become a reality. He was the first person that I asked if
00:40:41 ►
he’d give a presentation to Blanque Norte, and not only did Eric say yes right away, but he even helped us enlist the other speakers.
00:40:48 ►
Of course, I would also like to thank all the Palenque Norte volunteers,
00:40:52 ►
especially Drew, who without his help, you know, these talks would never have taken place.
00:40:56 ►
And finally, of course, you know, all those who braved the incessant dust storms to hear Eric in person,
00:41:01 ►
hey, thanks for being there.
00:41:03 ►
If you’d like to see a picture of Eric when he was delivering this talk, by the way,
00:41:07 ►
just go to our Planque Norte website.
00:41:09 ►
In fact, we’ve got a small family of websites under the Matrix Masters banner.
00:41:13 ►
So if you go to matrixmasters.com, you can find links to our alternative news summaries,
00:41:18 ►
our.netter experiment on Planque Norte.
00:41:21 ►
That’s where we keep our selection of MP3s, is Plankinorte.org.
00:41:26 ►
So if you want to go right to the audio section, just go to P-A-L-E-N-Q-U-E-N-O-R-T-E.org.
00:41:35 ►
Well, that’s about it for today.
00:41:37 ►
I do hope you’ll join us for our next edition of the Psychedelic Salon,
00:41:40 ►
when we’ll be presenting Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2003 appearance at Burning Man,
00:41:45 ►
where he gave a talk titled,
00:41:47 ►
2012, A Change in How We Experience Time.
00:41:51 ►
Trust me, you really don’t want to miss this one.
00:41:54 ►
Thanks again for joining us today, and for now, this is Lorenzo,
00:41:57 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:42:00 ►
Be well, my friends.