About Benjamin Wachs

It was only after living in a Buddhist monastery in India, covering international nightlife for Playboy, and co-founding the Burning Man organization’s Philosophical Center, that I began to fully understand my lifelong passions of emergent cultures and psychomagical experiences.

The conscious mind and the unconscious psyche do not speak the same languages.  “Psychomagic” (a term coined by Alejandro Jodorowsky) is an experience the conscious self has that also activates their deep unconscious psyche, connecting them in a way that makes the impossible seem present, and creating opportunities for revelation, insight, and growth.  While psychomagic happens in the mind of the person having the experience it still seems like an act of magic — and is all real.  Sometimes these experiences even seem to have physical correlates, what Jung called “psychoid” elements: serendipities that are impossible to predict but make the experiences all the more potent.

Emergent cultures have the same quality of “playing” with reality, but at the shared level of communal psychology.  Culture is not like physics — we are able to change the rules to run experiments and see what happens.  To those experiencing it for the first time, the discovery that life can be this way also often seems like magic.

These elements — emergent cultures and psychomagical experiences — defy easy categorization and explanation.  Like poetry, like sexuality, they refuse to stay in convenient boxes and play by rational rules.  To understand them, we need to think rigorously but qualitatively — to engage in philosophy and anthropology as a wisdom tradition rather than an analytic one, that depends as much on the experiential as the abstract.

This is my life’s work.

My recent books include “Turn Your Life Into Art: lessons in psychomagic from San Francisco’s underground,” and “The Scene That Became Cities: what Burning Man philosophy can teach us about building better communities,” as well a novel, a collection of short stories about nightlife as a spiritual experience, and a collection of “fairy tales for adults.”   I’ve served as the chair of the board of the San Francisco Institute of Possibility, the Director of Communications for Saybrook University (which specializes in humanistic, existential, and transpersonal psychology), and am present the Writer in Residence at the Community Arts Program of the non-profit Hospitality House, where I offer writing workshops to the homeless and housing insecure.  I’ve been interviewed  by Nightline, the New York Times, the Stoa, and Serious XM, among others. My work has been syndicated in Gannet, on public radio, and across GateHouse Media.  My writing has appeared in the Village Voice, SF Weekly (where I was the bar columnist for three years), the San Francisco Chronicle (primarily covering and reviewing the arts), and Mission Local (where I was the bar columnist for five years), among other publications.  I am a co-founder of Substrate Arts magazine, where my writing also appears.