Axis Mundi

It has taken me a while to post my comments from Axis Mundi, a remarkable Burn that left me slightly flummoxed as to how to comment, and afflicted on my return with a cold that lasted for a week having spread to quite a few campmates. Those are kind of excuses, but not really. I was on the Playa seventeen days, arriving with the camp build caravan just after midnight, build Monday AM, and leaving on strike Wednesday mid-afternoon. The wind and blowing dust during build week slowed us down but not to a halt, so that camp infrastructure and interactivity structures were installed only a little behind schedule. I started asking my burning questions during the last few days of build week and through the event all the way to the Burn and even on Sunday at a nearby coffee camp that heroically continued to operate until they ran out of supplies Monday morning. The weather on the weekend for the Man and Temple burns was gorgeous, and we got lucky with the weather for strike and pulled it off in spite of being reduced to a skeleton crew. I had a great time, took just the right amount of psychedelics, got just enough sleep, reconnected with some sweet people that I had not seen for a while, and enjoyed the company and conversation with the lovely villagers I camped with. There were, it seemed, more virgin burners than usual which makes for a fun event, watching them have their first experience and finding out WHY we do what we do.

What I Learned

The questions were pretty well received and not one burner declined my request for consent to question them. The first one dawned on me while reading the Michael Pollan book about consciousness, A World Appears. I had my doubts whether it was a good question at first, after asking enough people and getting immediate and decisive “no” responses most of the time, and almost all “no” from the more thoughtful respondents. But discussions with a couple of yes-ers followed my thinking on the subject closely enough that I was heartened and decided to follow through for a final result. My reasoning is that everything in our consciousness, stream, train, or otherwise is a product of the same kind neurochemical activity and distinguishable only through the constantly changing manifolds of connectivity and entanglement both internally and with stimuli from our environment. So that in my often non-dual conception of reality, they are the same, train of thought and stream of consciousness. A stream of conciousness can morph into a train of thought, and there is a wide range where the junctures between stream and train and back to stream happen to be at the moment. Some good dialogue around this, especially in the wee hours after the drugs had peaked, but while we were still altered enough to be receptive enough to alternate ideas.

The second question occurred to me while cleaning out a yellowjacket trap on my property and recalling stinging incidents in my own life, and a couple good getting stung tales I have, including getting stung on the dick while unmindfully taking a leak beneath a highway bridge back in the early seventies (there is more to the story than that of course, this is the teaser). No doubt, there would be plenty of sting stories to recount by the general population, many recalling childhood events that might open up the conversation. And there were. I had a sense that it was fun for people to recall something that was a little, but not too, painful, and almost everyone recalls their first sting if they had one. See playa results for the numbers.