The Greeks had this concept of the diamond, which is force and sort of an entity, it depends on who's talking when, that connects you to your destiny, that connects you to the divine, that pushes you to go where you need to go and become, who you need to become. Socrates actually referred to it. He said that he knew that he was making the right decision to drink the hemlock because his diamond was normally harassed about so many lesser things, was in complete agreement with him, was utterly silent when he said he's going to make this decision. And so it's this force, this entity that pushes you to become who you need to become and go where ultimately fate wants you to be.
In psychological terms, Jung was saying it is an urge to self-development, it is an urge to fully individuate yourself and become not who you are told to be, not who the world is trying to make you be, but to become who it is that you yourself internally are striving to be, ought to be, and to become that. The problem is that this is really a convenient thing. Greetings Future Fossils, this is Michael Garfield, reporting for duty, episode 202. The podcast explores airplace in time.
And you know, other things also, right? This is the show, that all kinds of stuff. I'm really excited about this episode with Kaviat Magister, Benjamin Wachs, the resident philosopher of Burning Man, who has appeared in a group setting on the show before. I'll link to that in the show notes.
But today I get to share this conversation with Ben Kaviat that focuses on his life and work methodology. And I think that a lot of folks will really appreciate this because we have, on the one hand, all of the outward-facing scientific and philosophical forays into a mysterious unknown, but there's an internal horizon also, a horizon of discovery and development, of individuation and maturation and transcendence that his book, Turn Your Life Into Art, really speaks to. And it's such a beautiful book. It's just delicious.
It's full of amazing stories. And he's such a masterful storyteller. And so here we are. It's the kind of person that you just pull a chord and let write and write and write and talk and talk and I love it.
I love it to this conversation. We took it into some very strange and interesting places that are pertinent to my own writing projects, specifically in as much as we can kind of establish a Jurassic Park, Disney, Meow Wolf, Burning Man, taxonomy and talk about the ways that imagination and amusement and science and technology and art all come together. But a story for another time, those of you who have been missing out on the Jurassic Park book club, we have three calls left to do on these two books by Michael Kriton. So join us on Sub-Stack or Patreon and get in the mix that this conversation around this has been so immensely rich and I will be releasing the recordings from our first conversation as soon as I can.
Now seems like a good time to shout out to new supporters Jacob Foster of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, a true homie of the highest order, d-i-i-s-i.org. I'm going to get him on the show as soon as I can. Timothy Hare, superb participant in that book club conversation. Brian the Barcheologists.
Oh yes, Brian Fleming. I definitely want to follow his Sub-Stack about dog behavior and chaos theory if you're into that kind of thing. And Steven Fisher, who runs the Delightful Facebook page, I acknowledge psychedelic class warfare exists. Yes, all of you are wonderful people and I'm glad that you have joined the ranks of folks helping you keep this show afloat.
Every liking and subscribing and reviewing the show is putting food in the mouths of my children and I know we're in another recession. But if you feel like step it up, becoming a paid supporter finally, then know that also I edit to music and music you're listening to now, I recommend playing on a separate device or separate browser tab while you're listening to this conversation. This is a soundtrack I was just commissioned to produce for the University of California at San Diego's Qualcomm Institute Gallery for a retrospective on Biosphere 2. I'm put together by Biosphereian Mark Nelson, whom I've spoken to on the podcast in episodes 94 and 95 and he's an intensely cool guy and curated by Yacob and Lilimos, who is a very, very interesting Berlin-based architectural visionary weirdo that I hope to get on the show soon as well.
So if you're not into the making regular monthly contributions thing, I get it. But you might want to roll over to Bandcamp and grab the soundtrack to this Biosphere 2 retrospective and then, you know, go walk around under some trees or something on a beach. And with that, I thank you deeply. Here is a superb and winding conversation with Kaviat Magister about how to turn your life into art.
How are you? I'm all right. No matter how much time I ring for myself, I always seem to be pushing against some deadline, but I think you have it worse than me. Oh, 2023 I think is the singularity, like obvious now.
It's clear we're here, things are crunched and is trying to put clown cars inside clown cars. Yeah. So let's talk about your book. Okay, let's talk about that.
Well, first, actually, I want to talk about you as a person. Who are you before you wrote this book? Like, where do you come from? I'd like to tell people I don't really have a from that I eventually out-distance it.
But okay, I don't know that this will go well, but sure, let's talk about me. How far back do you want to go? All the way back. All the way back.
Taproot. Okay. There was always something different about me as a child. Little did I know that I was a chosen one, spoken of in prophecy.
But at the time, I had all the beginnings in the American Midwest, or I strove, to build up the skills that would eventually lead me to greatness and glory. So I know that we have to go all that far back. But as I talk about in the most recent book, True in Your Life in the Art, there was always a sense that I had, indeed, growing up in the American Midwest and living in an academic background, but not a high flying one, that there was some kind of experience that should be out there that I didn't have access to, that I was put that was possible, but that I didn't know how to do and I wasn't seeing around me. And on the one hand, it's probably not at all unusual for people to have a sense in their lives, even their young lives, that something is missing, something is different.
There's something to strive for that strikes me as completely normal. But at the same time, a lot of the other people who have really put their time and effort into these kinds of experiences seem to have something similar that they talk about. So maybe that's relevant, maybe that's not. We're in the West, mostly Indiana.
I'm a Kansas City guy. Okay. Well, Kansas City. Missouri, Kansas.
Missouri. But then we did the thing where my first burn in 2008, I left and hitched out on a bus to San Francisco, thinking I was going to get the trimweed, and then fell through. The people I was working with were sick, and I had just read Ralph Potts' Vagabonding. And so I was in this nexus of the uncommon art of long-term world travel.
And yeah, I ended up crashing at these people's spot in San Francisco for like a week before they kicked me out and then was wandering around the bay for weeks with nothing to do. And my guitar and all my clothing and stuff on my back. Anyway, but I want to hear about you. I want to ask you this, and so brought that up.
What was that experience like? Was it filling? Did it bring you wonder? Was it hollow?
It initiated a long phase. Like this was 2008, means I was just 24. And I had no anchor in my life at that point. I thought I was going on to a PhD program, but I didn't.
And so this and then like Burning Man happens. And then it was just like, and then it was ruthless for three years at least. I had no address. Like I was couch surfing.
I actually met Mike Daggle and Troy Dayton at the couch surfing mixer in San Francisco that year and and the Jacqueline North, May she rest in peace. Yeah. So it felt like the beginning of something. Just you had to go through the wilderness to get there.
It launched me into a career of itinerant exploration. Yeah. Yeah. What about you though?
Well, that speaks to me because actually when I was around 24, I dropped out of grad school or attempted to would ultimately be unsuccessful and headed out into the world for a number of years about four on what I call the time a pilgrimage to a destination not of my choosing. And I didn't spend much time in the West Coast or San Francisco at that point. But I did travel across the US and into Europe and the Middle East and eventually then come back to the US and bounce around for a while before first ending up in upstate New York for about five years and then eventually moving to San Francisco where I have now lived for longer than I've lived anyplace else in my adult life by a large margin about 16 years now. And yeah, I know how did that happen?
Believe me, I ask myself that all the time. And I have thought a lot about leaving at various points only to eventually realize that for all that the San Francisco Bay Area is very much living life on the hard level in some ways that if I were to go anyplace else, I would enjoy the journey, but I'd eventually try to recreate what it is that I already have here. And so maybe I shouldn't go at that point that the time to leave is when I no longer want this life. So your experience of long itinerants speaks to me.
That was part of my life too. Indeed. So like how did you wrap up in Burning Man? Right.
So when I was living in upstate New York, there's a bit of a story here. I figured that's what we're here for. So what the hell? When I was in upstate New York, I met an artist named Tandra Carr and we immediately hit it off became really deep friends.
But she was in the process of leaving upstate New York. She had decided to buy an RV, pull her kids out of school, start homeschooling them and take the RV and travel across the country. And so we only had a couple of months in the same place. But she left and a few months later, I get a call from her and she tells me the story about how she'd been driving her RV through Nevada and she pulled into a Walmart parking lot.
And there were a bunch of other RVs in this parking lot and she wondered what was going on. And so she walked up to someone and she asked them, Hey, what's happening here? And they said, Oh, we're all going to Burning Man. And she said, Burning Man, what's that?
And they tried to explain to her and she said, Well, can I go? And these were back in the days when tickets were plentiful at the gate. And so they said, Sure. And so she's she went.
She had that experience and she was now calling me from Colorado where she was living with some people who she had met at Burning Man and telling me that I had to go and do this thing. And I said, Wait, you want me to go across the country and travel into the desert to what? Look at sculptures for a week. That sounds like a terrible idea.
I'm not doing that. And we are about it. I absolutely refuse. I couldn't imagine why I would want to do this.
And eventually she said, Okay, well, I'm going to invite you to come visit me here in Colorado and we can go to some burner events and some parties that they throw. I said, Well, sure, I'll come visit you. That's easy. And so I went a couple of times.
I went to a few events and I realized that I'm actually not a party person. I have never really gotten much out of just saying, Hey, let's go to a party. There's going to be a bunch of people. There's going to be music.
There'll be DJs. There'll be really bad booze. That does nothing for me. But these events, these things that they were throwing, I had to admit they spoke to me in some way.
There was something that I enjoyed, something going on here that I was not used to seeing in this context. So, okay, okay, I got more interested and more engaged. And then a couple of years later, I was moving to San Francisco. I packed up all my things, put them in my car and drove across country.
And while I was on the way, I stopped to visit some people as I was going. And one of those people was Sandra who that year had a funded art piece. She's got an art grant on a re-end. And so she was in the process of making this piece.
And so I stayed with her for a week, two weeks, something like that and helped out a bit on the project. I'm not a visual artist or a sculptor. I have none of those skills. I could run errands.
I could help organize things. I could go get the first people who were actually doing the work, that kind of thing. And when I got to San Francisco, which was the week before Burning Man, I got a call from Sandra who was now on the road going to Burning Man to set up a piece. And she said, hey, one of my crew dropped out.
And so I have his ticket. And since you actually helped on the piece, would you like to go to Burning Man now? You have a free ticket waiting for you at the gate. You can camp with us.
I'll take care of all of that. You just need to get a tent and ride down here. Can you do that? And well, I was in San Francisco.
I knew literally no one here aside from my girlfriend. And I did not have a job. And so there really wasn't a good reason not to at that point. Okay.
So I was pretty close to the neighborhood. All right. I'll get a ride on Craigslist all by a tent. I can go do that.
And so I went and got into Burning Man that way and had a pretty good time. I did not have a transformational experience. I did not have one of those. Yeah, I did not have one of those moments that you hear so much about where people go and their minds are blown and their lives are changed.
That was not me. I said, oh, yeah, there's something here. This is pretty cool. I can see now why people do this.
I went back to San Francisco and that might have more or less been it except like I said, I didn't know anybody here. And I thought that perhaps volunteering for Burning Man would be a good way to meet people. I seem to like what they were doing. We seem to have something in common.
It's actually, I since discovered that it's not really true that because Burning Man is San Francisco's Burning Man's central office hub or at least was at the time that it was really meeting volunteering for Burning Man in any other place is a great way to meet people. Here it's a great way to work on Burning Man and I had not realized at the time. So I went to a volunteer fair that they had and I looked around and I saw that they had a media team and I said, oh, I can do that. I'm a journalist to have that skill set and I met Action Girl, Andy Grace and she said, oh, yeah, no, you'd probably be able to volunteer for us.
But we're now accepting all our volunteer applications on the website. So I'm going to actually send you back home and log in our website and fill out the volunteer application. And when you have filled that out, just mention that you met me and we talked and we'll get you on the team. And I said, great.
So I went home, I pulled out the website, I went to the volunteer section, looked at the volunteer application and was so disappointed. I was just devastated with disappointment because it was a perfectly ordinary volunteer application. There was nothing interesting or whimsical or artistic or funny about it. It was exactly what I would have filled out if I were volunteering for any other workly organization.
And that wasn't what I was here for. I didn't want to do that. But then I thought, no, this is a participatory culture. I can fix this.
I can do my part. And so I took a few days and created what I would like to think is still the most surreal volunteer application that they have ever received in the organization's 30-odd year history. Every question I tried to fuck with in some way for the question about what's your emergency contact. I believe I wrote something along the lines of as a cynic, I believe that we are all fundamentally on our own.
As an alcoholic, what are you doing looking at my sister? In the event of an emergency, I will kick your ass. And for the utterly ridiculous question of where do you see yourself in five years? What are your goals?
What would you like to achieve? I wrote a long sprawling response about how what I really wanted to achieve in five years is to finally crush the amazing Spider-Man that I've been working at this for so long. And I tried so many things. And yet everything that I tried, he seemed to somehow say, but I don't know, it's like he had some sort of spiders sense that let him see that he was in danger.
And I don't understand. I know that's ridiculous. But it's like that. But this time I was going to get him because I had the perfect team and the perfect plan and I went through all this detail about the absurd supervillains I was bringing in and the plan that I had to finally get him.
And I said, the only thing that I really regret about this right now is very exciting for me. But the thing that makes me sad is that having had a chance to talk this over and share with my best friend in the world, Peter Parker, we used to be so close. We've done so distantly recently. And I don't get why that is.
But you know what, we'll have plenty of time. Once I finally crashed Spider-Man. Once I was right Spider-Man, I'll get that friendship back. We'll put it on track.
So that's what I want to do and what I want to achieve. So when it was over, like I said, a few days to put this all together, let it over. I decided it was what I wanted. And I started off.
And of course, didn't hear back that day. I didn't hear back the next day. I didn't hear back that week. I didn't hear anything back in two weeks.
I didn't hear anything back in a month. And eventually after about six months, I decided that this I must have screwed this up. I was too weird for Burning Man. This wasn't going to happen.
And what could you do? So I let it go and got on with my life. A year and a half later, I got a response from Burning Man. What I had not known, I could not have known, was that the media team had gone through a major shift.
Leadership had left. And he had just gotten appointed. And he had a lot of people who were in the same idea what she was living in. What year is this?
My first year in Black Rock City was 2006. So this would have been 2007, 2008, something like that. Was Maggie Deval part of that team at the time? I don't believe she was part of it at the time.
I think she bailed already at that point. Anyway, go on. Yeah. So they had basically gone as they were trying to figure this out, a solid group of team captains.
And so they hadn't done any volunteer recruiting for all that time. And now that was starting to bite them in the ass as they were running out of people to fill shifts. And so they said, oh, shoot, we have to fix this. And so the woman who was in charge of volunteerism at the time, her name was Terme, wonderful, person, amazing artist, said, Andy, OK, what we'll do is we'll go through all the applications we've gotten in the last two years.
And we'll look for the person who should be our volunteer coordinator. And then we'll get them to help actually wrangle and recruit volunteers. And so they were going through all these applications. And the story goes that Terme came to mind.
Laughter Assoff printed it out, walked it over to Andy's desk, put it in Andy's desk and said, here's our guy. And Andy read it, laughed her ass off and sent me an email saying, oh my God, how did you fall through the cracks? Yes, clearly we need a volunteer coordinator, but you like to gig. And I waited a day and then sent Andy an email back saying, hey, Andy, wow, it's really good to hear from you.
It's been a while. I have to tell you, I'm with the Haspen Music Festival right now and we're very happy together. They listen to me and they get back to me when I ask for things. And so it's a very good relationship.
And so I'm thank you so much. But I think I'm happy to stay where I am sincerely. And then at the end in parentheses, I wrote an all caps. Oh, who am I kidding?
He was always been used. Yes, a thousand times. Yes. And that's how I got started with Burning Man.
So how did you become the philosopher, the resident philosopher? And then I do want to get to the book. But let's establish some context here. Yeah.
Yeah. So what happened was that as the volunteer coordinator for the media team, I spent a lot of time talking with volunteers about Burning Man. And a lot of that was over email and group messages and things like that. And eventually Andy and Will Chase were looking to revamp their blog on their website.
And Andy reached out to me and said, hey, we really like the way you talk about Burning Man. Would you consider writing for a website? Is that a thing that we could get you to do? And I said, no, I don't think so.
I'm, thank you. That's flattering. But no. And Andy wrote back, well, I didn't expect that answer.
So let's get a coffee and talk about it. Can we do that? And I said, sure, I'll always get a coffee with you. So he sat down over coffee and he said, why?
You don't want to write for a website? And I said, because I've looked at your blog and it's all perfectly good. It's all fine. But it's all very raw rise and Burning Man.
Great. Aren't we excited? And that's not what I want to do. I'd want to ask much more challenging questions, open-ended questions about the culture, about how this works, about what we're doing.
And that's, I completely understandable that you wouldn't want someone doing that on your own website the way that it should be done. So I think I'm going to save us both the trouble and not ruin the perfectly good relationship we have. And Andy said, oh, well, actually, that's what I want you to do. That's why I'm reaching out to you.
That is exactly what I want you to do. So knowing that when you do it. And I said, I know you think you want that. No, there isn't self-immolation kind of the point.
Not to call it the last year I went to Burning Man was 2017 when the guy ran into the main. And I haven't figured out how to get back after that. But anyway, there is this sort of ouroboros thing going on here. There absolutely is.
But they tend to save that for the art more than they do for the actual organization. And innovating yourself doesn't look good on federal permit applications. Yeah. So I said, I know you think you want that.
But honestly, the money that I say is something controversial. It's going to get blowback. It's going to be a problem. And again, I'm just I just see this going badly.
And and he said, OK, here's how serious I am. I'm just going to give you publishing credentials. OK, I'm just going to give you the ability to publish anything at any time on our blog, no editorial review process, no scheduling, no, no any of that. You just publish whatever you want to publish and you'll have the ability to do that.
Now do you believe I'm serious? And I said, well, OK, I still think this is going to go very badly. But if you're that serious, then yes, I'll give this a try. I will I will see what I want to put out there.
And this was somewhat controversial within the office itself. But at that point, I was a well established friend and collaborator with several Burning Man apostates, including Chicken John and John Law, both of whom I was friends with. And so there was some discussion about whether I could be trusted to have that kind of access. And I have to say, Andy, really went to the mat for me.
She said, no, you've told me what you want. You want something interesting and thought leadership about Burning Man and, you know, that goes deep. So this is the guy to do it. And we have to let him do that because that's the only way it's going to work.
And so they let it happen, which I have to give them immense credit for. And it was successful beyond anything that I had imagined. It became a I became the standard bearer for the for the blog and for Burning Man providing interesting thoughts about Burning Man. And so several years went by a couple years and then out of nowhere, I got an email from Larry Harvey, and I haven't had not met yet, but who I had been avoiding meeting.
Because as soon as I started writing what I was writing on Burning Man's website, my I got inundated by local burners who wanted answers from me about what the work was doing now and why they were doing this and that. And I was trying to tell them, Hey, I'm not in the room when these decisions are made. I don't make these kind of decisions. I'm just writing what I think on their website.
And I said, Oh, yeah, right. There's no way that Burning Man would let you write what you write if you're not really on the inside. And I kept trying to tell them, No, I'm really not. And these conversations went very badly until finally completely by accident.
I hit on the magic phrase that was my get at the jail free card, which was I've never even met Larry Harvey. And as soon as I said that people went, Oh, well, if you've never even met Larry, you can't be that much of an insider. So okay, never mind. And that allowed me to go on with my life as I was writing these things about Burning Man on Burning Man site.
And so it became essential for me to be able to keep saying that. And so I actually avoided several opportunities to meet Larry because I really did a little much to have that kind of Burning Man was there were a lot more controversies within Burning Man's community back then about things. And so it was, so it worked for me to not have to be in that center of things. But then out of nowhere, I got an email from Larry saying that he's been reading my work and following it and he's very interested in meeting with me and talking with me.
So could I set up an appointment to meet him with a secretary? Can I ruin your situation, please? Right. Really put me in this point where I was where I had to decide, okay, what kind of person am I am I the sort of person who says, No, I'm sorry, I can't meet you.
I was ruined my street cred. Can I do that? And I ultimately decided that no, I was not that guy. So I made an appointment and Larry had me come visit him at his apartment.
And so I came over and I rang Bell and got buzzed off and went to his apartment and walked in. And eight hours later, I left asking myself what just happened? What the fuck was that? Now this is, this was not actually that uncommon, a first meeting Larry's story.
A lot of people have stories about how they met Larry for the first time and got involved in these long elaborate conversations. But eight hours is the longest that I've heard yet. Somebody has a longer one to have read that. And the truth is he and I profoundly hit it off.
We really did. It was a beautiful meeting of the minds of the point where I was actually wondering if I was being pranked, if somehow that people had briefed Larry on what I wanted to hear and they were fucking with me by having that level of sampadico agreement. But no, we really just completely hit it off and became very close friends. And when he founded the philosophical center, which was part of Burning Man's charter, Larry had insisted that there be a specific part of the organization dedicated to Burning Man philosophy, to the ideas of Burning Man, history of Burning Man, to do intellectual leadership.
He invited me to be a founding member along with the Stuart Ingram. And that's really how that all happened. I became a philosopher because Larry started calling me a philosopher basically. Fair.
So now let's get to it. We've had the salad. Now let's have the meat and the potatoes. The book.
I want to talk about psychomagic. I want you to introduce people to this because I suspect that a lot of our listeners, I'm going to shout out to all of the metamodern magic weirdos, and folks who Naomi most obviously, who you were on the show once with her already and Mitch Manano and all of these people, Connor B. There's lots of people that, Jacob, pretty much everybody that has been on the show that has been to Burning Man, Psychomatic has been a thread on the show. But I want you to give us authoritative introduction to the subject because you do such a great job of it in this book and go.
Okay. So this is book 201. So psychomagic. First of all, I cribbed the name from Alejandro Hudarowski.
So let's be clear on that. I did not come up with the name. I'm not going to be in the term and I am very much working off of his concept. So let's give Dew and props and lineage acknowledgement there.
Hudarowski's primary point is that our conscious cells are a very small sense of who we are in total, that the vast majority of who we are is actually inaccessible in some way to our conscious cells. And you can take that on several levels. You can take that on a purely materialistic level. There are neurons firing in your mind right now and you are not aware of it at all.
Your cells are divided. You might or might not be aware of your heart beating at any moment. But the point is that physiologically, on even that basic level of whole lot of things, all of the very important things are happening that are not accessible to your conscious mind. You can take that at a psychological level as well.
You have things that you have repressed. You have things that you are on autopilot for. You have SEMA and framing that you live in but are not consciously aware of. You have things that you project out into the world and patterns that you inadvertently repeat.
All of these stuff that is lumped into the idea of the unconscious and subconscious minds are things that you are not generally consciously aware of. But nevertheless, have an immense impact on your day-to-day life, on everything about how you experience the world. And then if you want to go there, you can talk about it spiritually. You can talk about the spirit and the soul and how we are affected by these things.
We are these things in a profound way. But we don't have access to them. We can't point at them. We can't scratch them when they eat.
We don't even notice necessarily in a direct way when they do. And so all of these things are vital to who we are and how we engage in the world. And the problem is, Hodor Rasi said, that when you are trying to change your life or do something profound with yourself, these aspects of yourself that are outside of your conscious mind are what you need to be in connection with. But we always try to communicate them with the tools of our conscious minds.
We talk to them as though they were unconscious selves. And the problem is that's not a language that they speak. Our unconscious selves do not speak the language of pep talk. They do not speak the language of rational argument.
They don't do charts and graphics. And none of that actually works for them. And so the idea is that if you want to reach the deeper parts of yourself, you have to speak a language that they understand. And those deeper parts speak a language of symbolism.
They speak the language of art. They speak the language of magic. They speak the language of archetypes. And they speak the language of action.
They respond to things happening and the powerful symbols, not to carefully constructed sentences and rational arguments. And so the art of speaking to the deeper parts of ourselves in the language they understand is what Hodorowsky termed psychometric. That you use these tools, these languages of the unconscious self, to get it to pay attention and to react and to engage in a way that it normally would not. And whether or not you think of that as literal magic, it certainly feels like magic.
When it happens, it feels like the world is different than you thought it was and much more as possible than you imagine. And things that seem like they were immovable boundaries are suddenly very permeable. And so it is in many ways the art of, it's an art form that uses the world itself as its medium in order to speak to the deeper parts of yourself and make what seemed previously impossible suddenly apparent and engage with. And then there's this whole piece of it that you expound upon in the book about Jung and the Diamond.
I'd love to hear you unpack that. Sure. I'll be able to. Yeah.
So the notion which Jung liked Freud, like all the preeminent psychologists of that period, often went back to the ancient Greeks for their terminology and for their reference points, which is where you get the edifice complex and the death of life impulses, the nachos and their awesome things like that. And the Greeks had this concept of the Diamond, which is force and sort of an entity, it depends on who's talking when, that connects you to your destiny, that connects you to the divine, that pushes you to go where you need to go and become who you need to become. Socrates actually referred to it that he said that he knew that he was making the right decision to drink the Hemlock because his Diamond was normally harassed him about so many lesser things, was in complete agreement with him, was utterly silent when he said he's going to make this decision. And so it's that in the Greek context, it's this forces entity that pushes you to become who you need to become and go where ultimately fate is wants you to be.
And in psychological terms, Jung was saying it is an urge to self-development, it is an urge to fully individuate yourself and become not who you are told to be, not who the world is trying to make you be, but to become who it is that you yourself internally are striving to be ought to be. And the problem is that this is really a convenient thing. Personal growth of that kind does not necessarily fit in with the lives we have, it doesn't work well with a nine to five job, there are all kinds of responsibilities that the world wants to put on you. On the one hand, the Diamond can be a tremendously joyful force.
If it's working with you, or rather if you're working with it, then it seems like synchronicity happens on your way, opportunities come up, it's a joyful process. On the other hand, if you're working against it, if you're pushing it down, if you're saying no, it's not, this isn't convenient right now, I have other things to do, I have other priorities, then the Diamond can become a destructive raging force, which is pretty amoral in the way that it will wreck your life in order to get you to pay attention to things that you down, you feel like you ought to be paying attention to. And the notion with the Diamond in psychomagic is that, and here I should say I'm moving away from the strict order of asking interpretation. I'm talking, moving now into what I call the San Francisco style, psychomagic, school psychomagic.
But the idea is that you have, in the Diamond, you have an ally on the inside of someone's head when you are engaged in psychomagic, because all psychomagic really happens in the heads, in the experiences, in the psyches of the people who are experiencing it. It's not what you do out there, it's what happens in there. And this is different from the way that we generally think about conventional art. So for example, if you are painting a painting, the painting exists out in the world, that's what is happening, that's what it is.
The painting is the object, it's the thing. If you're composing a symphony, well, the symphony is, it's the music that's being played, it's the music that's happening out in the world. Psychomagic only exists at all if the, some part of the unconscious psyches of the people who are experiencing it start to perk up and say, oh, this is interesting, I can work with this, there's something I can do with this. And in that the Diamond is your ally in this, because if you can create conditions under which someone's Diamond or someone's Psyche more generally says, oh wait a minute, this is interesting, I can use this for self development, this is a direction I want to go, then action will start happening on the inside and it will start to move in that direction.
Psychomagic as an art form is not about saying A, B and C or creating X, Y and Z, it's about creating the conditions under which something will happen in someone's inner psyche, in that part of themselves that goes on below the surface, you're not saying what's going to happen, you're creating the conditions under which they are going to have this kind of reaction. And then you don't tell it what to do, you follow where it goes. And so in that sense, you are trying to reach their Diamond in a sense and say, okay, I've created these conditions, where are you going to go with this? And then you facilitate that.
Awesome. Thank you. Yes, perfect. So, I'm in conversation to focus on like a solar hit, anything like a lens.
2005 when I visited the University of New Orleans and we sat on the levy, it was right before Katrina, my friend and I sat on the levy and took a lens and smoked weed, which is like, anyway, I want to pin here into something that you bring up on page 74 of your book, because I did exactly the wrong thing in this regard. And I just want to loop out here and bring this up. So the phenomenon of changing your life after having this kind of art experience is common enough that it's spawned a warning aphorism, don't marry your parakeet. It means that right after you get back from Burning Man, don't make any sudden life changes, which is exactly what I did.
And yet it was precisely what was required of me by my Diamond, which was this being that I had really just discovered in that moment at the time. When I was cut loose and it was into the bay with no map other than just a plastic map. Just like Google Maps, laminated map. I was marking with a Sharpie.
And so I wrote about this for Reality Sandwich back in the good old days before it was co-opted by Delic Corporation. And I'll send you this essay because I think you'll get a kick out of it. And how Terrence McKenna says, don't give into astonishment. I gave into astonishment.
And that was a call of my Diamond. And so doing, I learned to listen to my intuition and learned to know, you know, have an accomplice. So what do I use? You take a left or a right out of the door when you walk out and it's left.
Okay, great. And then that brings you into this thing. And so I, this is, there's a story in your book also about a garden party. And I'd love to hear you tell that, like, weave that into this and that story and how destiny and choice and synchronicity and magic are all mixed up into this thing.
And then this, it is like there's this admonition not to, not to radically transform your life, but in fact, that is precisely also the point. So like, let's talk about that. Okay. Yeah.
So I think that, because again, I've, we've had similar experiences here. I threw myself into this long period of travel many years ago too. And actually I've done that sort of thing several times. And so I'm tend to be with you actually, that in many ways marrying your parakeet is exactly what you want to do.
But I think that the admonition is a useful one because people need to understand that if they're actually going to do that, they really are throwing open the doors of possibility in their life. And it is not going to be the same. Later in the book, I talk about a joke that I had with the artist Robin Zero that if we were ever get, you know, a group of people who are really good at this together and have regular meetings, we would call it the life-ruiner's guild. And the idea, be as much as anything, we're ruining our own lives.
The more we do this, the more we follow our intuitions, the more we listen to this, the more we are blowing up our lives. And we don't mean that in the sense of everything gets worse, we mean that conventionally speaking, it's hard to have a conventional life when you are following this, that it is going to, it is going to screw up your priorities. Like I was saying before, that the diamond can actually be violent in some ways against the conventional things that it feels are holding you back from truly becoming. And so it can, my career as a climbing journalist in some ways got ruined by a discovered that I really could bring truth and beauty into the world.
Because the more you focus on truth and beauty, unless you are going to play the game of, oh, I'm going to put out bullshit content for, for, that looks good on algorithms. It's very hard to have these deeper, passionate, unconditional values in life and live in a way that is cooperative with the world around you. So it really matters that people understand, just as an ethical precept or anything else, it matters that people understand that if they're really going to do that, if they're really going to cross this threshold, that things aren't the very least, they're going to get extremely weird. And that in many ways, you may be blowing up the safe life that you have made for yourself.
Yeah. And in fact, those years of my vagabonding, my partner, through Ice Engaged, we, and married innumerable times informally, right? Never legally. But we've been together since 2004, we have two kids now, but like she and I went to burning that together.
And that, and it was that first time. And I left, I, conditions in my departure were in order to hit your right of San Francisco, I had to leave you for the Temple Burn. And so she and I split at that point, and it really felt like a, it was like one of, I think we broke up three times at Burning Man. Then we got married, like on Saturday night, and then we left, and then it was like turmoil.
It's like, you're absolutely correct that the, in order to surf this stuff, you end up throwing yourself into some extraordinary chasms. And yeah, so, but I want to hear about the Garden Party. Sure, sure. So, this was an event where some people had taken private space, a lush garden area, and turned it into a sort of musical extravaganza, where there were a bunch of different sort of glades in it, and they had put musical instruments in these different glades.
And then at night, several hundred of us, or maybe a hundred or so, I don't know, maybe several hundred of them, went in, dressed in formal wear, at a no-phones event, and wandered around at night in the dark, going from glade to glade, and seeing the spaces that were set up, and hearing people play on the instruments. And it was just, it was a sort of a magical experience in and of itself. But before we'd gone in, some friends of mine had said, hey, we want to stay with us, stay close to us, while we're all wandering around here, because there's a ritual we want to do with you, we have the thing that we want to do with you, so make sure we can find you, because it's no phones. And I said, yeah, sure, no problem.
And then we immediately got separated. And I was in a strange headspace. This event happened after Larry had died, and like I said, we'd been very close friends, and his big memorial at the Castro Theatre had been just the night before. So I was actually in a, wanted to do whatever my friends wanted me to do, but also I was actually in a good place wandering around this strange and wonderful environment at night, and just coming across by came across and just being in the present moment.
And so I actually was perfectly comfortable just a well, we'll have to do that some other time. And it was getting very late, it was getting towards one in the morning, which was when we read it, okay, we're going to start packing it up and heading out. And I was in this, on this trail in one area, and I figured, okay, I'm going to finish this trail, and then I'll leave a space and go home, and that's what I'm going to do, that's my plan now. And then off in the far distance, I heard a piano, because you know, piano is one of the instruments that people brought in, and I'm real ones, not just keyboards, playing Leonard Cohen's Alleluia.
And I immediately picked up and focused on that. This was a song that has a great deal of meaning for a whole lot of people, it is in many ways our modern secular sacred music. But it was very particular for me at that moment, because I had sung that song at Larry's memorial the night before, and it had been what had turned out to be one of the great musical moments of my life, and seeing that in front of a Castro Theatre, and it was a very cathartic moment, but it was one of those musical experiences where the crowd was completely with you, and you're all just writing this and elevating this, and oh my God, it's amazing. And so I hear this, and a part of me says, oh, I should go over there, and then I'm just like, no, that's ridiculous.
What am I talking about? That's just somebody's playing that song. I don't know, make up the line for it. Where did that even come from?
So I'm going to do what I plan to do, I'm going to walk along the trail and go home, and that's what's going to happen. And so I finished my little trail walk, and they've started singing it. I can't hear which lyrics they're on, because it's like a dance off the distance, but it's very clearly a bunch of people now singing to that. And again, I have this impulse of, I must go there now.
What in the world is this? That's ridiculous. I don't own this song. It's not like, sing out a little.
I have to be part of that. What? Come on. Other people get to play this.
So, no, I'm going home. So I head towards the exit that is best for me, and turns out that actually takes me right past the glade where the piano is where the people are singing. And now they're still singing, and now I'm like, okay, I have really strong impulse to go over there. And I'm like, no, come on.
Let other people sing this. This is whatever they're doing is not about me. I've had a good night. And then as I'm walking maybe 20 feet away from them, and nobody sees me or anything, like say it's dark, it's night.
The only light is at the piano. The person who's playing with piano keeps playing it. It doesn't start another verse. And he says, this is this would be someone in Henry who I'd like to become friends with.
He says, okay, so I know there are more verses. That's really interesting. Yeah. It was in the weird, meta-modern, magical.
And also a very active member of the future fossils listening to you. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. Wonderful.
Yeah. Henry says, okay, I know they're more verses. I don't know what they are. Does anyone else know any other verses?
At that point, something in me just goes, okay. And so I walk over and I start singing the next verse. And there's this immediate reaction, people cheer, that's exciting. And we sing a couple more verses and then bring it to an end.
It's another really much smaller group, but really triumphant moment. And when we're done and the applause and the cheering is all finished, I feel at hand on my shoulder and it's Robin, one of the people who wants to do the ritual with me at the some point tonight. And I look at her and say, oh, this is a coincidence. And she says, no, it's not.
We couldn't find you. And so we created a summoning ritual, a magical summoning ritual to get you here. We got to run the piano. I told everyone we're going to sing hallelujah.
And if we just keep singing hallelujah, he will show up. And I swear to God, Michael, I felt weirdly summoned and compelled by this whole thing. It was not only really psychologically acute of it felt like I was resisting a call this whole time, it eventually became irresistible. And I had to do it with the point is it worked.
It absolutely worked. So that's interesting because in that sense, the call, the destiny, the summoning, there's something else going on here. And I've had Naomi on the show in episode 149. She and I and a couple of other folks talked about was Ta-Zoomi and Dares Ohay.
Dares is especially unhappy about that episode and wants me to remove it. But that's my show. Anyway, we talked about Agragors. So something that I've noticed in my own experience in life is that it's one thing to think of it in a kind of a simpler union, it's like the anima is, oh, it's your own, it's the feminine aspect of yourself or the animus or the identify is in that way.
But there's something transpersonal and communal about this or the answering the call is answering the call of a group of people that are actually invoking this. And so in the sense that an Agragor being for the five people listening to the show that don't know what this is, because I'm obsessed with it and I talk about it all the time, that these entities that appear as a moire at the intersection of people, where Jesus says, we're three or more gathering my name, there I am. And my relationship with my wife, as I've discussed numerous times on the show, dating back all the way to the Paisley and Taliese episode with Michael Angelo, another fabulous burner. That relationship was the first unofficial wedding of that relationship was consummated by this being I called Angel Squid, which was accidentally invoked during a partner acid trip that she and I took in 2007.
And we switched T-shirts because I was feeling rather dissociated and I felt like I needed to be more incarnate or something. And she was wearing a short screen printed with a squid and I was wearing this shirt that had like, it was from this event that used to go on in Lawrence, Kansas, where we met at the University of Kansas called the Red Balloon to do, which was this massive art walk, open houses all over town, and everybody's got galleries and performances set up inside their homes. And the shirt was gorgeous, it was this pink shirt with a few red balloons that had eyes on them. But it was like this sense of like a discarnant observer.
And I was like, well, actually it was a yellow shirt. It was like, what do we do if we switch these shirts? We switched the angel shirt and the switch shirt. And this is what we did.
It was like we had closed a circuit. And then this thing, this third thing opened its eyes between us, the Egregor, and that kicked off this profound investigation that I had with this. I had no idea the phenomenon of Isha Devas, all of this stuff. None of this was familiar to me and was something I'd stumbled upon in the way that you stumbled upon the piano.
And so like, this is a key piece of it. I don't know really what I'm asking here, but I think that I guess one thing I want to talk to you about for sure, and I mentioned this to you in email before our conversation, was the piece about danger and risk, right? And you say in your book that we can't guard rail these experiences for people. Okay, because this is where I want to land this, because I come from a Disney family.
My father worked for Disney for 20 years, and before that he worked for Universal Studios. I grew up in amusement parks. And so all of my experience of psychomagically design and Burning Man and these kinds of things is held in contrast to the experience of going into the back door of Walt Disney or Universal, going through the handicapped entrance, cutting the line, and riding back to the future 25 times. But also being there when the dinosaur ride opens at Animal Kingdom, and being on the first group of people to go through that ride, and the ride is maladjusted, and I get a headache because the car is shaking so badly that they have to turn it down afterwards.
And so there's things about Disney that you can't create magical experiences for people without some element of danger and risk. And yet they do everything in their power to mitigate it, to downplay it, or when people die in the park, to completely whitewash it, pave over it, act like it never happened. And so this is again to the point of when I hear my friend Maggie DeValle talking about the 90s in Burning Man, right, like the 96, 97 these years that were just like absolutely insane people were still bringing guns and this kind of thing. So yeah, so there's a fork in the road here, but I want to make sure that we have time in this conversation to get to those two things.
One being the way in which one's destiny is not merely one's own. And then also this point about the fact that I'm standing here looking at all of my like Jurassic Park memorabilia, I was at the World Premiere, Jurassic Park in 1993, University of Stuya's Junath. You can see the boom because the reel was off, and when Death's Edge is getting spat at by the Delafisor, you can see the boom, Mike hanging in the shot. So there's this thing about, you can't, John Hammond wants to create a safe experience for his guests and you can't do that, they're dinosaurs.
Like you can't have a transformational experience that's just, and so this is the problem I've had with transformational festivals from day one is that they're really going to transform you. It's not merely a consumer experience where you clip in, you get your ticket, you come out, oh cool, you get to see all the things you want. It's like, oh, there's no, in most of these places, do the Rayvac. There's no harm reduction team on staff.
Okay, I'm done ranting. You're awesome, go for it. No, this is one of the more complicated and confounding aspects of this, which is that these experiences, if they are going to work, they cannot be benign. Just how dangerous they are in any particular area of physical danger as opposed to psychological danger as opposed to social danger.
They don't have to have all of those at once and they can have different odds, but they can't be benign, which is to say they can't be a simulation of themselves. They can't be a, they have to be real sakes. This is one of the principles that I outline in turn your life into art that the stakes have to be more potent here experiences than what the stakes have to be real. And real sakes means there is risk, there is danger, something could go wrong.
And I don't want to say that ethically that means we just ignore danger, we say, aha, we are devil, make care. No, of course it is, it is ethical and right to be concerned about the danger that people are going through the risks they are undertaking, but it's, there's a way in which I applaud Disney for wanting to make a very safe park. Of course we want it to be safe. Damn right.
But if there are certain kinds of experiences that you are going for, it turns out that those experiences cannot be benign. There has to be risk attached and risk can be terrifying. Risk means there is an element of danger. And I think part of the reason it works, first of all, is just that dangerous experiences tend to be more potent in and of themselves.
But also because again, the essence of psychometric is does that underlying part of your psyche, does the deeper part of yourself perk up and take notice and say, oh, this is interesting. And that happens when sakes are real. It doesn't happen when sakes are not. It doesn't happen in the same way when you are watching a movie, when you are going through a simulation.
There is nothing really at stake here, passive consumerism or even to some extent active consumerism, just if nothing can go wrong, then nothing can go really right either. And the result is that you have an experience that is inert, that is benign. The way that I put this in the book is that if you take Disney and you acknowledge first of all just how brilliant all the imagineers are, that they are best in the world at creating these kinds of experiences. And then you give them this nearly unlimited budget to create some kind of experience and do what they want to do.
You'll get something amazing, but you will never get an experience that Disney can create that using that approach that is as profound and powerful as breaking into Disney would be. And the reality of just that simple thing of, hey, we are going to break and enter into this theme park, it's going to be profound and powerful and memorable and affecting on a level of which no ride can be. And this is one of the essential points of psychomagic, that you get to this transformative potential. You get that possibility because something is actually at stake.
And it very often can be physical risk, but it just as easily and certainly in the kind of work that I do is emotional risk is profound truth coming up, is deep stuff that you have repressed, that you don't want to acknowledge or that is powerful in your life, that is for some reason been hidden is coming up with that. And that does not only does that not feel psychologically safe, that is in fact, dangerous to the life that you are living. If this stuff comes up, if it is acknowledged, then you not only have the opportunity to change, but you may have the change and that kind of ramifications for the way you organize your life or the relationships you have and just for the way you think about yourselves. That kind of danger is where the profoundly transformative stuff is because precisely because it is real and because it gets the unconscious to say, okay, this is interesting.
In a world full of simulacra and fakes and curated experiences, this is something that I can actually work with. That, yeah, that's so key to this is an art form. I don't know if you've read Carl Heisen's team rodent, how Disney divorced the world is guy really. It was a story in this book about exactly that thing about people who in the 1998 group of kids who broke into his kids, teenagers, or they broke into Disney in Disney World in Florida.
And I guess now it may be a little different. Governor DeSantis is canon pointed at Disney's political exclusion, but Disney historically has its own fire department, it has its own zip code, it's own postal service. It's like it's a weird sort of nuclear state within Florida, it's its own world. And so there are not, it's not at the time anyway, it was not really in a clear police jurisdiction.
And so the cop, his private security that Disney uses to troll the parks after dark, did what they were deliberately, they were told not to do, which was to pursue these people in a car chase. And Sirens on, they ran the break in party out of the park and then right outside the gates of Disney World, the right as the pursuers were turning back because it was no longer their zone, the people who had broken into the park, their car was struck by another car and they were killed. Oh my God. And I just bring that story up as just a way of saying that, I don't know, I don't know why I bring that up.
But it's a story that I don't, hardly anyone I know knows. So it was a serious legal case and I pray that my father doesn't listen to this episode because it's like, this is a mouse paid for my lunch. But at the same time, this is the world that we live in. And so I want to double back now and I want to hear you talk about the community piece of this.
Yeah, the agrigorps. But before I get to that, let me mention that the way that I have found is both most ethical and most efficacious to handle these dangerous aspects of psychomagic is not to create better guardrails because that just ultimately makes your experience more inert is to get better at handling danger. That the right approach is to get better at being with people and being supportive of people as they go through these dangerous moments of being better able to react to these threatening situations as they come up. That getting more familiar with danger and better at handling it is the way in which you can keep these experiences potent and keep people as safe as possible.
That this is a better approach and it's one that I think is crucial to the continued, let's call it potency of places like Burning Man that are trying to straddle this line of, okay, we are responsible, we are safe, but also we are really trying to create environments where these kinds of experiences can happen. It matters that we get good at handling danger. Burning Man, if the famous phrase is safety third. Safety third, right.
So what's one and two? Did you ever get that sorted out? So comes out of a context in which in early Burning Man, especially early DPW set up, it's people were doing incredibly dangerous things that people hadn't done before. It wasn't a context of, oh, well, this is the way we've done it before, so we know how to do this.
They were very much making it up as they go along. And nobody ever came up with what one and two is specifically, although I would imagine it would be some combination of self-expression and fun. But the idea was we don't put safety first, there's something else we're going for. And a really important aspect of this, in fact, my notion of getting better at handling danger comes out of this conversation I was having with the former DPW foreman and he's actually currently Burning Man's OSHA director.
It actually has one. But Tony Coyote Perez, who was saying that safety third worked because in those days you had people who really understood what kind of danger they were getting into. They had played around with fast cars. They knew how to use all kinds of tools.
They could put safety third because they were actually really good at doing this. And safety third becomes a lot less feasible when you have people coming in fresh out into this environment who don't know how to use tools, who don't understand how engines and chemicals work, who are not familiar with handling rough vehicles. At that point, safety third is a problem. Safety third works as an ethos when you have people who are very familiar with how danger works.
It's way more problematic when you don't. And this is a this is a culturation issue for Burning Man. This is a genuine struggle that they have. But it also I think pulls us back into the communal question, right?
Because there are things that you can do when you have that kind of community and things that are much harder to do when you don't. The communal aspect of this has been a very interesting development for me. First of all, I wrote this book. I wrote Turn Your Life in Art in some ways as a how-to manual for how to do something, how to do these kinds of things.
And also as a love letter to a scene that I really do feel is past. That it's not that nobody is doing psychometric in San Francisco anymore, far from it, but that the energy has shifted from psychometrical experiences to immersive and interactive theater experiences, which is not the same thing. It has many of the same trappings, but it is not the same thing. And you can tell that in a small part because psychometrical experiences are much harder to commodify and monetize immersive interactive experiences.
You can do those seven days a week with a matinee on Sunday and keep repeating it and have it go basically the same way every time and be perfectly safe. And you can sell your tickets. Psychometrical experiences are much more dependent on what is happening in this moment with these people and the stakes are real and it's not terribly safe. It's not only harder to replicate, but the more you do it, the less potent it becomes, because it starts to be routine.
And so the inner psyche stops picking up and stops being interested. It's really hard to scale psychometrical experiences. It's really hard to make them consistent. You're working against all of that.
They are not the same kind of art form at all. And the experience is of psychometrical. I'm not saying no one's ever had a transformational experience in immersive theater production, but the conditions are much less likely. The psychometrical artist is much harder to do in a repetitive way.
And so you had this amazing scene in San Francisco that I was privileged to come in as last third of, where people were really doing this for each other, where you had this underground where everyone was creating unique rituals for one another and unique psychometrical experiences as a part of near daily life. And it was extraordinary. And it is not happening now. And it's not happening for perfectly good reasons.
People want to use their art to pay their rent. I get that. Amen. That is much easier to do if you just cut back on a psychometric and cut back on a psychometric.
And suddenly you're doing an alternative version of what this thing is doing. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm hearing Santa Fe and I love meowelwove. I love it so much.
But this is the case that as that organization has scaled much as an organism as it scales on here and I'm bringing in the complex systems piece, right, that a child starts out very young and playful and full of exploration, discovery. And then it's old and becomes more and more risk-averse because the bigger you are, the harder you fall and the more you lose. And so suddenly the last time I went to a concert and they're like suddenly meowelwove is taking through people's bags and confiscating their drugs. That wasn't always the case.
And say in this book, a couple of things. One you say fiction is the enemy of psychomagic, which is interesting. Even though when I took my dad to meowelwove, he was at first on plus because he's like, why this is never going to work is because narrative, at least in the Santa Fe exhibit, is not obvious. So one story they want to be sucked in and pulled through a tune of narrative, in my words, not his.
And then you also say no one's life was ever changed by writing a roller coaster. And I think that this is true that meowelwove does emphasize narrative and that it was wrong, but it's a very, it's a networked non-linear. And that way, I feel like meowelwove is the sort of midpoint between Burning Man and Disney in that respect, in that they are trying to give people more choice, more autonomy, more opportunity for find things out for themselves. But they've run up against this problem that you're identifying, which is that you can't do this at scale as an institution, as a capitalist entity, without running up against these kinds of concerns.
Right. Yeah. No, psychomagic does not scale well. And that is more, I've talked about this in the aftermath of writing the book and going around and touring and talking to people.
More clear it is that no, it does not scale well. It does not scale well. And in fact, the things that you have to do to scale, which is to create it, make it systemic, you're making it more of a mechanism. We go to do this and we're taking out all the interstitial bits and focusing on what everyone has to hit.
That makes it less personal. That makes it less possible for people to follow their own diamonds through this. You're supposed to follow the story line. And you're supposed to be in place A, in place B, in place C.
And that means you cannot wander off in your own direction. And so suddenly, you know, those parts of yourself that might otherwise be appealed to, they're not interested anymore because it's not their story. It's not about them. It's, you know, it doesn't scale well.
And that means that you can't half-ass it. If you're going to do this, you have to really throw yourself into it. And that is, I think, one of the crucial lessons for me about Burning Man, actually, that the 10 principles only work when you are constantly applying them as questions you're asking. Can I get more inclusion?
Can I get more participation? Can I get more immediacy? Not, hey, I've done this. I've done this.
So I've checked off the immediacy box. I've done this. So we checked off radical self-expression. Are people in conscience?