Every year, the Burning Man Organization announces a theme meant to inform and inspire the art for each year. Anxiously awaited every January, when it is finally put forth, it sets in motion a fount of creative energy and activity. The theme of Burning Man in 2006 was Hope and Fear: The Future. It was in my opinion one of the most provocative themes of recent years. We stand at an incredible tilting point in history and never before could these possibilities tilt one way of the other so drastically.
But this theme also in some way struck me as somewhat ironic: to me Burning Man expresses this theme on virtually every level already. I have mused for years, and told newbies that Burning Man is in so many ways a boot camp for the future. This future could hold both extraordinary joy and prosperity, but also unimaginable hardship. While my immediate experience of Burning Man is unfolding inexorably in the present, I see the evidence everywhere of a world to come with its hopes and fears for humanity reflected and refracted in this microcosm we create each August in the desert.
We as Americans live in relative abundance compared with about 90% of the planet, with more opportunity than many could ever dream of. Simply the opportunity to be at Burning Man is a sign of this privilege. Our technology and supply of cheap energy has made us, in material and technological terms, as rich as kings and queens of 300 years before. We can circle the globe in aircraft, access the world’s knowledge from our desktops, and cure diseases that killed even those in our parents’ generation.
At the same moment, we are at war for access to the last of the globe’s cheap energy. The American Empire seems on the decline on the world stage. Comparisons to Rome, or even Babylon, are thrown about with abandon. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of our planet is close to unraveling. The specter of man-made Climate Change has been growing for decades, if not centuries, while naysayers kept action at bay. We are now perhaps beyond the point of no return.
The playa is itself like a caricature of this world of extreme climate: arid, hot, with sudden wind, and even rain storms that can sweep over in a moment’s notice and send everyone scurrying for cover. It is a tabula rasa for creativity, but its desolation is also a place where only our ingenuity allows us to survive.
With all of our RV’s, water, tents, food and the cases of Gatorade and Corona, we are hardly in immediate jeopardy. But we are all aware of all the creature comforts we must port along to fill in where nature provides nothing but dust. Every participant (at least those who don’t end up in the med tent from dehydration) is acutely conscious of the need for, and scarcity of, water for existence: a condition most of the people on planet Earth now face, and more so every day under even more dire circumstances. You can’t just switch on the lights either. Securing energy to make everything work is a special and painstaking effort. We see and even put in the fuel that makes it all go.
But even this rather safe survival game we play also (re) teaches us the skills of community and sharing. What seems on the face of it a condition of sometimes life-threatening scarcity can be transformed through sharing into a feeling of boundless abundance. As we form alliances and spontaneously give our gifts to others, a new form of society takes shape, one both completely new to us and profoundly as old as culture itself. A strange thing happens for people who are normally individualistic and dependent on money for everything; this sharing places everything that is needed in our reach when we open ourselves to it.
Spontaneously self-organizing systems, generating order out of chaos, spring up everywhere in small groups, camps, pods, and ad hoc villages that fill the mandala of Black Rock City. We pull together and help one another. Within a few days of arriving, the city itself springs from the dust into a city of 40,000 souls complete with art cars, theme camps and art installations, post offices and beauty parlors, coffee shops and kissing booths, a vast and rich world that even all these people could only create through profound multiplication of their creativity and intention.
When all this miraculous World is humming along in its full glory and I am immersed in it, I have the strange feeling that we are experimenting in our parallel world with a reality we are preparing to manifest (albeit significantly modified) into the “Default World”: a reality of creativity, innovation, sharing, play and intention. Against the backdrop of a barren seemingly “god-forsaken” place, this spirit is everywhere. It teaches me again and again each year that the impossible is possible, and while I might be surrounded with challenge or difficulty, this energy can be transformed into a gift, that magic and beauty can sprout up anywhere, like the lotus emerges from the muck.
In the Default World, with all of its unconsciousness and insanity, an eternal debate rages within me — is there some order to the universe, or is it a meaningless series of happenings and coincidence? Each year at Burning Man I find myself again falling on the side of order, intention and magic. Being there, I feel like I am riding a waves of delirious synchronicity moment to moment: meeting just the right person, finding just that correct size of bolt I need from my neighbor to finish my shade structure, or seeing that man in the bunny suit at just the moment I am thinking of Alice in Wonderland. I feel this being in flow is as close to an experience of magic as I have ever felt. Perhaps the idea of “the field of infinite possibility” espoused by gurus such as Deepak Chopra or popularized by the movie “What the Bleep?” is not so far fetched. It is my failing, or my fears, but I find it hard to practice, or even trust, this consciousness when I am back in the default world. When I am on the Playa, I find it inescapable.
In the world we are facing, one on the edge of civilization’s and Nature’s potential collapse, this strikes me as one of the most powerful lessons we can learn for the future. As we probe deeper into the strange order of the universe: energy, matter, and time, physicists sound increasingly like mystics. But we are finding them to be correct, and not just on the level of scientific theory — the implication is that there is even a way to live within and affect one’s reality with this new perspective.
As the World teeters on the brink, I hope that enough of us can start learning to manifest reality from this place, because we may need to do this to survive. Creativity, ingenuity, play, community, and intention in service of reinventing of the whole system is not just a more entertaining way to live — It may be the “ace in the hole” that allows us to make it through the dark bottleneck to a more sustainable civilization.
Make no mistake, there are few who take such a charitable view of what we do on the Playa each August. To many of the Default Worldlings, it is a “druggie fest”, “godless”, and at the best a silly and uncomfortable waste of time. The very same BLM that would probably be happy to see a coal fired power plant built at Playa’s edge, and casually tolerates trash and bonfires from the average American visitor, treats the Burning Man Organization to Orwellian drug surveillance and a white glove test of our Herculean clean up efforts year after year. Certainly there are also burners in our midst, including ourselves, who are taking it down a darker path. There are constant ideological struggles over the “spirit of Burning Man”, the encroaching commercialism, the breakdown of sharing, and the increasing number of non-participant gawkers. What we have is precious, and we owe it to ourselves to really grok what is most powerful within it.
All of us understand that someday this must all come to an end, and we will perhaps describe in wistful terms to children and grandchildren the magic we created here. As the man burns each year, I say goodbye to part of myself: the part that clings to material things, to the fear of failure, to people who may no longer be living or part of my life. On some level I experience this ritual as accepting the imminent collapse of the entire civilization (the Death Guild seems pretty stoked about it anyway), but for me there is more hope than fear in the letting go of this. This world must change, one way or another, there is no way it can continue as it is, even another 20 years. It may be overly optimistic, but I feel we are all here beneath the fun and frolic, secretly dreaming, inventing, and learning how to create and live in this new world to come— whatever it turns out to be. Hopefully we will have learned what needed to be learned, as we spread what is good and powerful about it throughout the culture, before that last man burns to ashes.
