Nomad Codes

a rather mindless stream of consciousness choked with slogans, beliefs, recurrent memories, contradictory plans, and perceptual maps. Burning Man stirs all this stuff up. Moreover, as Burning Man ages, its own “immediacy” becomes routinized and codified—an inevitable process, perhaps, though one that has encouraged many old-school Burners to stop attending the festival. Theme camps and spectacles grow familiar, alternative styles of communication and consumption are established, and participants and planners develop systems—psychological and technical—to manage chaos and fear. Even the injunction to “Participate!” becomes rote, and part of the experiential ethos of the festival now includes the active and creative resistance to this creeping process of calcification.
    What’s important to recognize here is that Burning Man’s rhetoric of experience is itself historical, and draws, in particular, from a deep well of American spirituality. The trope of experience already permeated Yankee Christianity by the mid-nineteenth century, when revivalist passions drew whole crowds into powerful fits and faints, visions and revelations. But it was William James who made this subjective turn fundamental to American religious understanding. In his famous tome The Varieties of Religious Experience , James argued that experience, rather than belief, was the ground bed of religious life, if not the cornerstone. “The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness.” [6] This emphasis on consciousness anticipated the individualistic and subjective turn religion would soon take, a move that implicitly generated interest in mysticism and what have come to be called “altered states of consciousness.” James argued that these states had to be taken into account if we were to develop an adequate picture of the universe in its entirety. Forever endearing himself to later psychonauts, James put his own neurons on the line by experimenting with ether, nitrous oxide, and peyote.
    By and large, James couched the experiences he described in Christian terms, although he discussed movements, like mind cure and New Thought, that we would now recognize as progenitors of the New Age. But the “cultures of consciousness” that came to define the West Coast’s spiritual avant-garde significantly detached altered states from well-defined religious forms. At Beat cafés and Acid Tests, and more formally at retreat centers like Esalen and the Ojai Institute, a variety of “post-religious” experiences began to be explored. Bohemianism has always placed a romantic premium on personal experience, and this romanticism flourished in the counterculture’s embrace of primitive exotica and psychedelic Orientalism. But California’s scene also reflected the West’s pragmatic culture of sensation and know-how, an essentially empirical approach to matters of the spirit that made tools more important than beliefs. Consciousness-altering techniques like meditation, biofeedback, yoga, ritual, isolation tanks, tantric sex, breathwork, martial arts, group dynamics, and drugs were privileged over the claustrophobic structures of authority and belief that seemed to define conventional religion. “Spirituality” emerged as something distinct from religion proper. Even when established traditions like Zen or Sufism were creatively engaged, they were embraced more as practical means for changing consciousness than as arid cosmologies or rules to live by. Experience became the teacher. It’s a tricky teacher, of course, and the ephemeral insights and ecstasies of consciousness can easily leave one in deep despair or confusion, high and dry without the raft of creed or belief. Nonetheless, given the sense that an imminent change was coming, either political or spiritual (or both), experience became the central countercultural path toward transformation.
    Curiously, this attitude reflected contemporary anthropological concerns with liminality and rites of passage; as cultural anthropologist Victor Turner explained in The Ritual Process , the intense, novel, and destabilizing experiences associated with tribal initiations heralded a new mode of social being. Yet because this new context lacked a homogenous cultural matrix in the 1960s and ’70s, the field of possibly transformative or meaningful experience was wide open—and certainly not limited to “spirituality.”