Nomad Codes

Everything was in potential service to the Happening. Every intense situation or wondrous rush was a potential launching pad of the new—or unraveled—self. This lack of distinction helps explain one of the more curious features of the era’s subcultures: the commingling of overt hedonism and spiritual ascesis. Many people would routinely move between these modes—meditating and fasting one week, gobbling drugs and partying the next. Even more potent and characteristic were the “Dionysian” fusions of these two modes into a powerful spiritual hedonism that encompassed sacred sex, psychedelic magic, and dizzyingly imaginative gatherings.
    Burning Man aggressively extends this tradition of hedonic ecstasy, especially emphasizing its technical or practical underpinnings. Op-Art visuals, disorienting sonics, and a self-conscious excess of sensory stimulation and conceptual reference all help undermine the stabilized frames of reference that, so the story goes, frustrate our capacity for a fresher taste of the Here and Now. Indeed, the festival can often seem like a single, distributed, full-sensorium brain machine, designed to bring us in tune with our mind’s ongoing construction of real-time on the fly.
    Burning Man’s bawdy blasphemy and hyperactive pace also insulate the festival from the sectarian excesses of California’s consciousness culture, which led some spiritual experimentalists into the arms of repressive situations conventionally labeled “cults.” It would be silly to insist that there is nothing at all cult-like about Burning Man, either in its organizational structure, its architectonics, or its transformative effects on participants. But it remains an open and rather slapdash cult, one that offers no particularly coherent message or any coercive demands. By multiplying the opportunities for novel perceptions and altered states, but undermining the coherence of individual trips with bacchanalian excess and a strong distaste for sacred cant, Burning Man represents, in comparison with the ’60s and ’70s spiritual counterculture, a “late” form of the cult of experience, at once an advance and a decline. The event is deeply skeptical about overt claims of power or meaning, but is also optimistic about the regenerative capacities of creative, full-intensity living. Though visibly ridiculous and profane, Burning Man’s faith in sensation and the carnival of consciousness is, in the end, almost innocent, even pure.

THE CULT OF INTOXICANTS

    One cannot overestimate the role that psychedelics have played over the last fifty years in giving modern spiritual seekers a real kick in the pants. Although avant-garde spirituality has marked the West Coast since the turn of the century, it remained a small and esoteric path until LSD and other drugs offered people a dependable and immediate access to powerful and compulsively intriguing expanded states of consciousness. Burning Man’s most relevant psychedelic ancestors remain Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Profoundly influential throughout the West Coast, the Pranksters’ Acid Tests were memorable expressions of the multimedia philosophy of party-as-drug. These improvisatory fetes deployed low-tech media, a ragged burlesque of thrift-store fashions, and the fusion of performance, participation, and prank. Kesey’s famous bus, Furthur, is about as Burning Man as the ’60s ever got: a gas-guzzling art car driven by a macho meth-head, hurtling down mountainsides with festooned crazies shooting film and barking bull-horn commentary through squealing roof-top speakers.
    On the surface, the Pranksters distanced themselves from the explicitly esoteric maps that other psychonauts were using in order to make some sense of psychedelic experience. At Millbrook, the upstate New York mansion that served as the intellectual Mecca of psychedelia in the mid-1960s, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), and others were raiding the vaults of tantra, Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism in their quest to maximize and comprehend their journeys. The Pranksters avoided such pretense, and their brief visit to Millbrook, as related in Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , was a culture clash. Kesey told Wolfe that, as far as the religious use of LSD goes,“It can be worse to take it as a sacrament.” [7] But Wolfe also noticed something deeply religious in the Prankster manner, a religion of unmarked experience that would go,