Hello.  My name is NEXT, and I was born on the Playa at Burning Man, 2013.  I went to Burning Man looking for G-d, and not only found that Jesus himself was in my campground, but got to meditate next to the King.  I dare say, I got my money’s worth.

And I did not even have to pay.  My Burning Man experience was gifted to me with nothing expected in return. One might say, “Mindfuck!”

But this experience gave me the courage to trust my brain and my mouth again to tell my story.  My brain, like all brains, can only make one decision at a time.  Multi-tasking is the art of doing multiple things poorly. A brain, like a computer, can only decide, “yes”, “no”, or “I don’t have enough information to answer that right now”.  That is it.  So, to keep my brain from becoming overloaded, I learned to follow simple Karmic rules.  Many of these are platitudes but, when I live by them, I make better decisions. I wish I lived by them more often.

A shorter summary of my rules can be found in a book called The Four Agreements. These are my longer, more complicated versions:

● You are not in control of this ride.
● If it’s hard, you are doing it wrong.
● Believe in Karma.
● Pay it forward.
● If it seems like there is a skunk following you everywhere, perhaps you're smoking too much weed.
● Be 100% present with the one you are with, even when you are alone.
● Anything worth doing is worth doing over.
● The only difference between love and disdain is polarity. Look for the amplitude; that is where the lessons are.
● As I ski through the valley of the shadow of death, I will be facing forward, knees bent, eyes toward success and always looking at the space between the trees and not the trees themselves. And I won't dawdle.
● Remove all SCARF threats or the lizard brain won't let go. SCARF are threats of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. If you are feeling SCARF, you won’t make good decisions.
● You are the world’s greatest manifester, and you have manifest the exact reality of this moment.  And you are still not in control of this ride.  That is easier to comprehend when you realize that the Universe is matter expanding into nothing.  Thanks a lot Einstein! 
● Every coincidence of your life has led to this exact moment. There are no coincidences.
● Success looks like today.
● Before making any decision ask yourself, “Is this in my highest good?”, and then LISTEN to the answer.
● Treat others as if your success depends solely on their generosity.
● Always prepare for the best case scenario.

These are my rules and they serve me beautifully when I pay attention to them.  When I forget about them, I have another growth opportunity to remember the rules.

Why would you want to read what I have to say?  Well, I predict that one day, in a few weeks or a few months or years, you will be walking down the street, seeing people casually smoking weed in public, and you might wonder how we got here. 

I have written Smoking Something to help tell the story of how we ended cannabis prohibition, from the perspective of one computer geek that realized cannabis was one click away from freedom.  Smoking Something is my story, and while I don’t claim that every word is true (some parts may be hallucinated), I hope that every word conveys the preposterous journey man has made in building a bureaucratic infrastructure to tax and track a weed that can spread like a weed and has more therapeutic, non-therapeutic and industrial benefits than we can shake a bong at.

Smoking Something highlights the work of visionaries like Steven the Angel, Mathew Cooker, Jesus, Sigmond, Kevin B Smiley, Puff Tripp and many others who played a critical role in the end of cannabis prohibition. Each of the people mentioned in the story will have the ability to comment or write their versions of the story right alongside. The goal isn’t truth; the goal is a great movie script. Mike Myers plays me or no movie deal.

This story is where Cheech and Chong meet the Wiz Kid.  It’s The Social Network meets Silver Linings Playbook.  Most importantly, I hope it’s a chance for you to sit back, shake your head, and laugh at the absurdity of our species. It is my goal to have it published online by the end of 2013. Please wish me luck. 
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What is Burning Man?
 
By NEXT.

Burning Man has been on my bucket list since a hippy friend of mine looked me squarely in the eyes and told me it would change my life.  That was six years ago at a time when I did not want to change anything about my life.  I had skied 60 days that year and just finished a bump lesson with Johnny Mosely.  I was happily married, had my own business that was stable and respected.  I lived in a place I adored and was on top of the world.  I did not want to change my life.  I wanted to keep everything exactly as it was forever. I bought my Burning Man tickets for my wife and me and we cleared our vacation calendar.  I knew my wife was not thrilled with the idea, but she was a trooper and she knew it was important to me.

“Thank you G-d, for my incredible life”, I said in a stoned prayer on a warm Tucson Arizona Sunday night. On Wednesday evening, I was in the ICU of Montrose Memorial Hospital as G-d laughed at my hubris. I was literally up shit’s creek.

Because of my illness (Peritonitis), we sold our Burning Man tickets, and it has taken me six years to give myself permission to go.

After that moment in 2007, everything in my life changed. And that circle ended when I was reborn at Burning Man, 2013. 

As a result of my illness, I started a new business with my wife and a friend.  The friend helped me save my old business when I was sick and I felt I karmically owed her a favor.  This new business sucked away all of our life savings before our eyes. It also sucked away my existing successful business, my equanimity, and my joy of life.  Most importantly, the business destroyed a 20-year marriage that I cherished more than my own self-worth.  Note to self, never cherish anything more than your self-worth.

Today, I am heading to divorce, I have lost the business to my ex-wife, and NOW I want my life to change.  And thanks to The King of Las Vegas, I did not even have to pay for my ticket.  I was gifted my ticket from a man who heard my story at a cannabis convention. My first experience with gifting.  It’s like fisting, except nothing like fisting.

I wanted to have as authentic an experience as I could.  I wanted as few preconceived notions of what Burning Man was so I could form my own opinion. But once at Burning man, I found myself questioning everyone else on what Burning Man was for them.

The best answer I found came from a ten year old kid twirling fire on the street.  “Burning man”, he said, “is like Mad Max meets Willy Wonka”.  He was right.

Burning Man is a congregation of people that gather on a dried up lakebed in the middle of nowhere Nevada and bring everything they need or desire to start an intentional colony for the rebirth of humanity in a place so G-d forsaken, nobody else would want it. Kind of like Jerusalem.

The idea is that rebirth does not need to be unpleasant, even in a harsh environment.  It can include art, and culture, and music and freedom and love and peace and rules for a culture to thrive and grow without peeing on each others liberties.  Literally! The dried up silt from the lake stores your pee like a smelly pimple on the face of the earth for all to remember and breathe for days.  This environment is so harsh that face masks and goggles are with you at all times to survive a dust storm that can limit visibility to nothing and make breathing a silty choke far worse than a pot hit.

Burning Man is like a new age adult camp with very lax councilors, but a very active police presence to constantly remind us that we are still in the good old USA and there are lines to not cross.  It is a festival for people who want to be conscious and unconscious at the same time.  But I smelled less pot at this festival than at most I have been to anywhere.  Drug use was kept very discrete and everyone was paranoid, perhaps for good reason.

There are a lot of drugs that are taken at Burning Man, but nobody ever offered to sell me any.  In fact, nobody sells anything at Burning Man.  Its one of the 10 principles.  Gifting.  Not bartering.  Gifting.  If you want something, ask for it.  Someone will give it to you asking nothing in return.  If someone gives you something, you take it and offer nothing in return.  If you did not want it, you can give it to someone else.  But most gifts are food or drink or a memento of the experience and saying yes is a habit that we humans have not cultivated.  I wanted to say yes to everything that was offered to me, but could not adapt my brain or my body to let go of the habit of scarcity that I have spent a lifetime cultivating and wishing I could change about myself.

Burning Man is a culture of radical inclusion, self-reliance, self-expression and responsibility.  I was told Burning Man was a leave no trace function, but I have been camping in the desert for over a decade and I know what decomposes in the desert and what doesn’t.  I was told that if I littered, someone would catch and stop me.  Who are these militant warriors that let me walk around naked, but not drop a gum wrapper?  Simply put, they are everyone.

Burning Man is a hassle.  I waited in a four hour line to get in.  While waiting I took the time to clean up some dog fur that was left in my van.  I threw the fur out the window knowing I was sneaking some biodegradable trash out the door five miles before the entrance.  The man in the car behind me, jumped out of his vehicle and picked up my dog fur and handed it back to me.  Oh shit, I saw this coming.

“This is your first year, isn’t it?” he said with a smile.  I said yes and he hugged me and said “welcome home”. I was not expecting that. I ended up getting a lot of hugs and I did feel like I was home.

“This is MOOP”, he proclaimed calmly and without authority happily handing it back to me.  MOOP is Matter Out Of Place.  Anything, even dog fur or pee, is not allowed at the event, or apparently even on the road in.  “But its fully biodegradable and makes great nesting material for birds I exalted”.  “It does not matter”, he said calmly, “it does not belong here and you are to take it with you when you leave.”

Why such radical trash protection?  Because there is no soil on the lake bed to decompose items and because we humans can’t tell the difference between dog fur and cigarette butts so everything must be swept.  My camp organizer even vacuumed up minor carpet droppings from the dust to make sure the camp was without a spot.  My vacuum busted open leaving dust and debris from previous darker dirt covered campsites on the ground.  I picked up the matter and left the dust, but it was a different color than the lake bed they call a Playa.  I found myself kicking it around to make my red dust blend in more with the white dust.  I truly thought I had lost my mind. 

By the end of the second day, I was going out of my way to pick up pieces of scrap MOOP because every piece stood out.  Unlike any festival or gathering I have ever attended, this one was spotless on a lake bed so full of dust that the spots stuck out everywhere.  People would tie a string to some MOOP and put it in the roadway causing people to stop and try to pick it up.  When they did, the jokesters pulled the string and made a fool of the MOOP chaser. This is what passed for entertainment and it was marvelous.
 
I went to Burning Man in the hopes of meeting G-d.  My life was without a rudder and I need direction.  I have lost what I valued most and Burning Man seemed the best place to restore my principles.

Burning Man has many lessons for us. It’s like summer camp for adults.  Most of the lessons are cliché and like most cliché’s, they are very true. Here are just some of them.

1.       There is only this moment.   Burning Man principle, “Immediacy”.

This is the most poignant lesson of Burning Man.  One moment it is beautiful, perfect temperature, semi-naked 20+ year old women walking around with painted bodies and enlarged "pupils".  And the next minute a dust storm has you huddled in a corner with ski goggles and a face mask wondering why you burned a week’s vacation for this shit.

Not every moment is perfectly pleasant.  I spent the first three days at Burning Man telling everyone who would listen that I know of so many better BLM sites that could hold 68,000 and be much more hospitable, accessible and even magnificently beautiful.  Every person I preached this to looked back at me and said, “That’s not the point. The Playa is part of the experience”. 

The Playa can be heaven or it can be hell and we must choose who we are in both conditions.  This lesson alone is worth the price of admission which is a total rip off and I would gladly pay double.

2.       Its more fun to share. Burning Man principle, “Gifting”

The most extraordinary mind fuck of burning man is what people are willing to give away for nothing but the experience. You would walk or ride your bike down the street and a topless beautiful woman would run up to you and ask you if you wanted a banana daiquiri.  REALLY, this happened multiple times and not just because I kept riding around the same block.

Two men walking down the street stopped to talk.  I was eavesdropping.  “Nice day, did you see the giant woman statute?”  “Would you mind if I tweaked your nipples?”  I almost peed my pants.  “No”, he answered and the other man tweaked his nipples.  These men were not gay.  I have magnificent Gay-dar.  The each tweaked each others nipples then one said to the other, “you’re not gay are you?”  And the other said “no”.  And the first said neither was he.  And they hugged and went on their way.

Three doors down, there was the spanking tent.  What the fuck!  You know what?  It felt good.  I deserved a spanking and the stranger giving it to me was a true professional that clearly had given hundreds because there was a line out the door.  Really!

But the most remarkable aspect of Gifting is that none of this was provided by Burning Man.  All of these tents, discos, art exhibits, vehicles, bar’s, restaurants, hangouts were provided by other participants and given to the event.  Burning man provided porta potties, two big structures to burn and the roads.  Everything else was donated by other participants.

3.       You are your own scarcity.  Burning Man principle, “Radical Self-Reliance”

Burning Man is an anti-alcohol event.  Even though everyone gives away free alcohol and there is more than you can ever drink.  The bathrooms are strategically placed in clumps near the campsites and away from the huge electronica discos.  There were not enough porta potties for me to drink enough to stay hydrated, let alone drink alcohol.  Our group brought 50 cases of beer and cases of margarita stuff and we can’t begin to give it all away. Nobody wanted to drink too much alcohol when dehydration happens so quickly and is so painful with an alcohol hangover. 

I think this is part of the conspiracy of Burning Man.  Its not that its an alcohol free event, it’s a “don’t be a rude drunk” event or even a rude anything. You may do it once, but you won't sign up for that punishment again, and the people who come back to Burning Man year after year, all embrace this.

And if you do overindulge, there are clinics at main intersections all manned by volunteers doing their “Civic Responsibility”.  Another Burning Man principle.

Burners also realize that everyone’s human and there were many times I saw someone helping someone else in need. I did see some ugly drunks and I saw more than my share of stoned or tripping people, but in the end, I just saw humanity.  Wild, dirty, pure, happy, sad, horney, curious, exhibitionist, experimentalist, vulnerable, clueless, humanity.  There is nobody but us on this Playa and we all need to stick together.  Other key principles that apply here are Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility and Participation.
 
4.       G-d is everywhere.

I wanted to meet G-d at Burning Man.  Perhaps that is a tall order, but I like to have high expectations. The moment I arrived there was a man who looked exactly like Jesus tending our site.  “You look just like Jesus” I said to him.  “Yea, I know” was his response.  And we hugged.

One night I found myself at this magnificent tent pounding out electronica music but it looked warm and inviting.  To the right was a sacred space with an altar with a body statue on it and peaceful  empowering sayings all around the altar.  It was clear that someone set this all up.  Someone spent hundreds of thousands of dollars erecting this 5,000 square foot tent with sound system and church and massage tables and pillows everywhere.  Somebody paid for this shit and hauled it miles into the Nevada desert, and it was not Burning Man.  Some fucking human with more money than common sense forked out hundreds of thousands of his own dollars so I could sit at a church and pray in the desert to the G-d of my choice.

There were idols of all gods around the room should I wish to choose one or two.

Sitting at the center of the altar in meditative posture was The King.  He was in full royal gear and he was immaculate.  Nobody is clean on the playa, the dust gets into everything and everyone and this guys face shined like dust would never dare land on royalty.

This is the billionaire that built this whole thing so he could supercharge this room with energy from the “free” massages going on and the energy of all the stoned people grooving to the electronica beat in the bigger tent adjacent. This guy was an energy jonesing billionaire with nothing better to do that build this whole scene so he can meditate.
 
So what did I do? I took a seat to his right and meditated next to him.  I honored him as the billionaire who put this whole thing together so he could vibe off the energy. I also thought, anyone with this kind of money could be a decent job prospect for me. Always angling.

We started chatting after our meditations.  It was clear that we connected and that this was what this moment was for. The King, had a tremendous presence and spoke right to my soul.  The Immediacy principle of Burning Man was alive and we both relished the moment, despite my desperate need to pee.  A common theme for me at Burning Man. I was not about to get dehydrated.

I told him a bit of my story and he looked me in the eye and told me that I have enormous power and strength, but I need to focus it in a direction and move.  He saw right through me and he never blinked.  It was clear that this was the dude responsible for this whole tent.  This guy has his shit together and has so much money that he just trips on giving advice as the King in the middle of his kingdom.

I accused him of being the man behind the curtain.  I told him that I thought he created this entire tent and structure and he just looked at me and blinked.  We all created this NEXT, he said to me.  I am just a guy, camping in a tent not far from here.  About then his beautiful wife joined him and I felt honored to be in the presence of their love.  I had this love once and it is the most special gift one can have.

As we parted, he offered me this poem called The Currency of the World.  I have linked to it here, but in a nutshell he explained that there are four currencies of the world. The currencies of Attention, Power, Transformation and Discovery. “Discover your inner power and it will transform your attention.  To give such value to your life that it is beyond mention.”

I had to pee so badly that I thought I was going to bust my bladder.  “Can I pee in the Playa” I asked G-d or King or whoever?  “It would be like peeing yourself, he answered”.   The next day, in the desert heat when I came across someone’s pee stain, I understood what he meant, the dried lakebed takes a long time to soak up that water. After that, I carried a plastic bag with me, so I could pee if I was not near a porta potty, in the most barren wasteland in Nevada.  I don’t always pee indoors when I am home, but here in the desert I am running for a porta potty and ditching the King. I truly have lost my mind.

He says in the real world, he is a life coach.  I actually doubt he paid for the tent.  But I don’t doubt he is G-d, as is his beautiful wife, as is this desolate Playa as is the man who pees in bag. As is his ex-wife. We are all G-d and we all could use a bath.

5.        You are not in control.

One of the things that really attracted me to Burning Man was the thought of getting laid.  I thought I did not get enough sex as a married man, well you get even less as a separated, unemployed, low self-esteem, looser. My cologne, Ode de la Desperation, did not have the effect on women that the store clerk promised.

But I figured at Burning Man, women would be stoned and open.  And indeed women were stoned and open.  I could walk up to almost any woman there and ask for a hug, and I would get a deep, connecting and beautiful hug from a total stranger.  Nobody said no.

On four separate occasions during the weekend, I made a deeper connection with a woman.  One that could have easily lead to my goal.  In each case, I tried to control the situation, and in each case I lost the fish (tasteless pun intended).

I may not have been the only guy in Burning Man who did not get laid, but I know that I could have if only I worked a little harder at not working so hard.

6.       Wherever you go…  There you are.

A week flew by and it was over.  Most people were not sorry it was over.  It had been a beautiful week, with significantly better than average weather thanks to dozens of forest fires that kept the Playa smoke covered and cooler during the day and kept the heat in at night.  I don’t put any truth to the rumor (that I started) that Burning Man participants caused those fires to help control the weather at our event.  But I do believe that G-d was looking out for me to have an enjoyable first burn, because everyone said this was unbelievably good weather.

But a week in the Playa is a lot and I too was ready for it to end, even unsatisfied with having met G-d or a girl.  I stayed late to help with cleanup, but there was not that much to do at the end.  Those who knew what they were doing, did, and those of us who knew nothing, watched and learned and took comfort that we will be better Burners next year when we come back to an indescribable week in the desert.

I came back to a campsite on the ocean to recover from the week.  I found a hut on the beach and before I left it, I took every scrap of MOOP I could find.
 
In the end, Burning Man is like malaria.  Once its in your blood, you can’t get it out. And I for one, would never want to. Going back to Burning Man is now on my bucket list for next year and I will bring a date. 

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