Burning Man 2014

Burning Man 2014 -- the Playa after the rain

The Burning Man Festival, held every year at Black Rock desert near Reno, Nevada, is the closest thing in our modern God-is-Dead Era to a religious pilgrimage to a sacred site. Burning Man is reminiscent of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in which Geoffrey Chaucer describes the adventures of a group of pious English pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury cathedral near the end of the 14th Century.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages)
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.

In modern English:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought into the root and all
And bathed every vein in sweet liquor with power
To generate therein and sire the flower...

And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage.

"Then longen folk to go on pilgrimage". Not in April as in Chaucer's Tale. But in early September, just before the autumnal equinox, tens of thousands of people drive out to the middle of an empty desert to create their own temporary Canterburys, Stonehenges and Ka'abas on the sands of the Black Rock Playa. Burning Man still awaits its description at the hand of a Chaucer-class bard. But in lieu of that yet-to-be-famous Black Rock poet, my friend and neighbor, Bruce Damer, PhD, traveled to Burning Man this year to give a few talks and to take lots of photos which he has been sharing with his friends.

Here's Burning Man 2014 through Bruce's eyes. Thank you, dear Doctor Damer, Our Man in the Playa, for recording some fragment of this modern-day pilgrimage for the enjoyment of us stay-at-homes.

May the spirit
of Blessed Sasha Shulgin
be with you
as we mine new magic
out of the old mystery.

Some kinda impromptu temple in the desert?

A shrine to fallen members of the tribe

Homage to Sasha Shulgin who passed away this year

Burning of "The Embrace"

The Destruction of the Temple

Doctor Bruce himself performing at Burning Man 2014

Bruce Damer Famed in NYT

My Boulder Creek friend and neighbor Bruce Damer is a man of many parts. He runs a company that creates virtual reality simulations for NASA and other organizations in which moon landings, lunar exploration, asteroid mining, for example, can be carried out on comfortable Earth-based computers rather than in the harsh airless environment of outer space. Bruce is the proprietor of a quaint hacienda in Boulder Creek which among its lush gardens, performance stages, meditation huts and pig pens, houses the world-famous Digibarn, a collection of historical computers from the primitive Altair to a Cray supercomputer--many of which actually work.

Recently Bruce has turned his considerable talents to the question of how life evolved on Earth and, using his ability to simulate extreme environments in software is attempting to simulate the primordial soup from which all life on Earth, including you and I, presumably emerged. Bruce calls his Origin of Life system the "EvoGrid" and has made it the topic of his PhD thesis at the University of East London. Last week Bruce's work attracted the attention of a major article in the New York Times and now my Boulder Creek friend is experiencing his fifteen minutes of fame.

Congratulations, Bruce. Now back to work. We're all waiting to see what sort of primitive creatures will emerge from your homebrew digitized primordial soup. But please keep them in their cages. The last thing humans need is competition from novel software-evolved life forms.

God Farm Tenth Birthday 8/8/08

My Boulder Creek neighbor Bruce Damer would modestly deny the title "genial genius" but I know Bruce as a remarkable being who in one person combines the psychedelic idealism of the sixties with the nuts-and-bolts practicality of the Silicon Valley hardware whiz. Ten years ago Bruce purchased a beautiful rural property with plenty of plans to realize his heart's desire. One of Boulder Creek's little-known gems is Penny Slinger's Goddess Temple located in a canyon adjacent to Bruce's spread and we jokingly referred to Bruce's new home as "The God Farm"--a stout masculine counterpart to Penny's delicate temple of femininity. Bruce's place is known by many names, corresponding to its many-handed functions not least of which is the Digibarn, a computer museum (next to the pig pens) which tracks the development of electronic minds from the ancient Altair to modern supercomputers. Bruce is pictured above standing in the core of a Cray supercomputer at the Digibarn. Although Bruce routinely hangs out with Air Force generals and NASA scientists, he dresses, as Allan Lundell once remarked, like a character out of Shakespeare who just got back from Burning Man.
Chief among Bruce's accomplishments is his work creating virtual realities, simulating for NASA and other agencies, the novel environments of space travel and inventing new realities that humans can practice inhabiting before they actually go there. Bruce is the author of Avatars!, the definitive description of virtual personalities circa 1997 and Bruce manages many consortiums of individuals whose job is turning fantasy into (computer simulated) reality.

Ten years after the founding of the "God Farm" Bruce and his wife Galen Brandt held a birthday party catered by the legendary Jia, photographed by Allan Lundell and Reno DeCaro and attended by the very cream of the San Lorenzo Valley Digerati. The party also celebrated the completion of an octagonal performance deck and a meditation hut built by Jim Rintoul and Steve Mauer. More pictures soon at Damer.com site.

The party featured a participatory mediation on the number eight led by Bonnie DeVarco, as well as several inspiration musical numbers. The 8/8/08 party was also the historic occasion of the debut of Doctor Jabir's declaration of Tantric Jihad, a radical challenge for the West to imagine new paradises commensurate with our new technical powers.

Nick was the last to leave the party and a happy but exhausted Bruce Damer accompanied him to his car. The moon had set and the brilliant arch of the Milky Way bisected the sky above us. As Bruce and I admired the stars, Bruce confided that he knew more about the Hubble telescope, our latest and most sensitive human sense organ directed into the external universe, than anyone should have to know. For he had recently participated in a computer simulation of a project (see below) to repair the Hubble and refit it for new missions.  
But better than the Hubble simulation, better than Bonnie's Ceremony of the Eight-Fold Way, better than Michael Moore's portable Electroscope, better than the private tour of the God Farm, better than the past-midnight Milky Way Galaxy arching over our heads, was my memory of the closing ceremony, Galen Brandt playing keyboard on the octadeck, surrounded by a circle of her friends, singing to her husband Bruce: singing to her husband Bruce love's old sweet song.

First Exposure

Today was interviewed at Bruce Damer's "God Farm" in Boulder Creek by Andy and Jennifer from Bend, OR (friends of Iona Miller's) who are making a video on the entheogenic origins of Christmas. Background music was a rare (for Santa Cruz) thunderstorm which blackened the sky. (Pix = Bruce and Jennifer). Bruce, Allan Lundell and I played the 3 Wise Men bringing gifts to the Infant God--and hoping to get gifts back, gifts that reflect our deepest wishes. Allan's wish: how would an enlightened community actually behave? Bruce (who lived for a spell in Prague) told of the traditional Czech visit of Saint Nicholas accompanied by two devils to whom you were supposed to give propitiatory gifts. I wanted from the Little God some new physics tool that would open new doorways into Nature--brand new applications of quantum physics that would directly connect our human minds to the several other minds around us. I wished to be given some concrete ways to use quantum physics to expand human consciousness. I wanted some new ideas for this blog which is intended to be a record of my efforts (as one of BC's token Wise Men) to create a totally new physics in which human consciousness is an essential ingredient. Bon voyage. Bon appetite. Bon chance.