Gone to Burning Man '12

This week, while much of the Reality Sandwich team decamps for the Burning Man Festival in Gerlach, Nevada, we offer a selection of noteworthy articles that appeared on the site earlier this year. We'll be back on Tuesday, September 4. Enjoy!

The First Extraterrestrial City on Earth
By Jonathan Talat Phillips 
“People have this tinfoil-spacesuit, 1950s idea of aliens, but the beings I saw were galactic bohemians, David Bowie–like art stars, flamboyantly androgynous healers, and outrageous alchemists. A lot of them had really cool tattoos. They come from advanced societies that have synthesized art and science, so they know how to have a good time."

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Eros Unredeemed
By Daniel Pinchbeck
The "free love" of the 60s was an experiment that remains incomplete. Humanity was not then up to the task of integrating the psychedelic, psychic, and visionary aspects of our being into the repressive social structure. More than a political revolution, we need, first of all, a love revolution, which is also a revelation: a clear-eyed approach to love and Eros.

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Why Rio +20 Failed
By Charles Eisenstein
Capital today is aligned with the increasing expropriation of natural resources because money is created as interest-bearing debt. This is how the destruction of a forest is, preposterously, counted as an increase in wealth. Unless we are prepared to address the situation at this level, meetings like Rio will be futile. 

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Edgewalker: An Interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal
By Erik Davis
Jeffrey J. Kripal is one of the most unusual scholars of religion working in America today. His interests include superhero comics, the paranormal, UFO research, the human potential movement, and the mystical experiences of religious scholars.

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The Beats: Remember the Tea
By Ellen Pearlman
Jack Kerouac called from a phone booth while his friends Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky anxiously paced outside. "Hello, I'd like to meet with Dr. Suzuki . . . Right NOW!" The scholar's secretary told him to be there in a half hour. Elated, the three friends skipped down First Avenue to hail a cab.

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The Batman Shootings and Crossover Effects
By Jonathan Zap 
Some movies that have high access to the contents of the collective unconscious are "window zones" or portals between realms, and weird and uncanny things happen in their wake. Particularly, movies about dark, occult things have a long history of these crossover effects.

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DMT, Creativity and a Philosophy of Psychedelics
By Terra Celeste
In this interview, Mitch Schultz, director of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, describes how a DMT experience inspired him to create a series of documentary films exploring quantum awareness, humanity's relationship to the life force of Earth, and the role of music, open source ideas, and the cyber-realm in generating new, non-destructive meta-mythiologies.

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Everyone is Pregnant
By Kate Aquino
Without a clue as to where to go or what to do with my life, I took a dart and threw it at a map. It landed on Park City, Utah. There I went, having never traveled that far west before. I checked into a hotel. That's when I experienced my first out-of-body experience.

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The Open Source Everything Manifesto
By Robert David Steele 
Sustainability can only be achieved through mass collaboration and the achievement of panarchy -- a constellation of co-equal hybrid systems of self-governance in which all individuals freely choose where they wish to be heard, and have full access to all relevant information.

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A Declaration of Psychedelic Studies
By Neşe Lisa Şenol
At this inertial juncture in history, I propose the inauguration of Psychedelic Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. I would like to do this by tapping Queer Studies as a justificatory precedent.

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The Shamanic Truth of Evil Spirits
By Itzhak Beery 
Perhaps you do not believe in evil spirits. Why should you? I've been a shamanic healer and teacher for many years, but even I didn't really believe in their existence. Well, this all changed quite abruptly when I was forced to believe and to find the tools I needed to fight back.

Image by *christopher*, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.