False Fatherhood II
How I got pulled from University, to Burning Man to a Sex Cult
“How do you do what you do? I mean, how are you so free? With people, with women?”
Rasmus had just got back from his semester abroad at Berkeley University and he and I are busy putting up a drywall. He had written out on a Facebook group that he needed some help with renovating a room. I had jumped at the opportunity.
I wanted to get to know him more, to understand how he worked. There was something I had seen about him, his confidence and way of charming people that I felt magnetically attracted to. Having been brought up in a moralistic Christian family, the freedom and authenticity of his new student commune, Mama Mystica felt like water in a dry land.
I first got to know Rasmus on a student-organised study trip to China with the Institute of Political Science. One year my senior, he was the crazy joker guy who was the heart of the party all the time. But right from the start, I felt a certain affinity with him. Everyone else at Political Science was interested in working for the government, but him and me had early on decided that we were interested in the private sector. Public sector bureaucracy was for boring men in grey suits. The private sector was more risky and there was space for more innovation and ambition.
I had met Rasmus for coffee a few times and talked about entrepreneurship and business. I was still married at the time so didn’t enquire too much about his private life, which I sensed was a lot more colourful than mine.
In my second year studying Political Science, I had taken a road trip in the USA with Freya. One stop on the journey was San Francisco, where Rasmus was studying for a semester at Berkeley University. I asked Freya if she could give me a night off where she stayed with our son, and I headed out to the Castro to meet Rasmus.
He was dressed in a tight metal studded leather jacket, had green spikes in his hair, and looked like he was headed to a Pride parade. He told me about life there, and was clearly inspired by a new found sense of freedom and exploration. I was a little taken aback, but didn’t want to appear judgemental.
On that trip, I was busy reading On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It’s an iconic book about the heroes of the Beat Generation who see the meaninglessness of society around them and decide that they just don’t give a damn. Fitting into other people’s expectations led to suffocation. Real living was being an authentic expression of yourself, irrespective of the consequences.
At this time, my relationship with Freya was starting to show serious signs of trouble. Seeing the way Rasmus was living, not caring about social standards, I decided that I didn’t want to live my life in this fake way, while I was dying on the inside.
So, heading out of San Francisco, on the way up into the northern mountains, I decided to take a risk and bring up a difficult subject with Freya.
“Freya, I need to talk to you about something. It is really difficult for me that we never have sex any more. So I have been using pornography,” I blurt out.
Beneath the frustration and anger of a sexless marriage, I was wracked with shame and guilt of my hidden porn habit. No surprise, the conversation didn’t go well.
It was not many months later that I found myself cycling away from Freya and our son on that cargo bike.
So having now freed myself of the chains of that relationship, I turned to a new kind of hope. Instead of the problem being me, perhaps it was the model of relationship with marriage and monogamy that I had been conditioned to believe from my earliest years.
As a married man, bound in that repressive institution, I had no real options. Now I was free to make my own decisions and take full responsibility for my life. All my options were wide open, and the world was waiting.
When Rasmus had come back from Berkeley, he started a bunch of crazy initiatives and events. It started with simple fancy dress parties, then it was burlesque, then sex positivity, kink and polyamory. A whole slippery slide of earthly delights and enjoyments.
His apartment in central Copenhagen turned into an underground hippie commune, taking on the name “Mama Mystica”. It was like he had brought some kind of spirit home with him, a goddess that was as enticing and seductive as it seemed edgy and dangerous.
Before my divorce, I had been around the edges of the community. Every Sunday they watched a movie together, and I had joined in that as often as I could. Now I no longer needed to be the slightly stiff, guilty feeling, married guy observing all the fun.
Helping Rasmus put up the drywall was my way of offering friendship and support to get more in. But Rasmus is vague, even evasive to my questions. So I leave that day with the impression that I am only seeing the tip of an iceberg, my curiosity growing even more.
Mama Mystica had already started growing a collection of crazy psychedelic art works on the walls and in the passages. I remember one day noticing a container full of used nitrous gas capsules and wondering what they were for. Somehow the idea floated into my brain that this might be something to do with drugs.
That was concerning to me. My upbringing had taught me that drugs were bad. They led to addiction and severe dysfunction, and were taken by people who were dropouts and deadbeats. Surely Rasmus and the Mama Mystica crew weren’t into that?
One evening at Sunday movie night, after the movie, the conversation drifted into drugs. I learned there, that psychedelics were a specific class of drugs, not at all like the hard stuff such as heroin or cocaine. Psychedelics were rather about opening your mind and exploring consciousness.
I go home and do my own research. And sure enough, it turns out that professor David Nutt, the world’s leading expert in the exploding field of “psychopharmacology”, had proven that drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms were perfectly harmless, and might even be good for you.
“Trusting the science” was something I took seriously at that time. So I concluded that this was yet another area where my parents had been too stuck in old-fashioned ideas. Perhaps this was the key to all the fun and craziness at Mama Mystica.
My first psychedelic experience was at The Borderlands, a Nordic version of the American Burning Man festival. I had the experience of lying on some kind of bed, while tall alien entities with big heads stand around, looking at me and discussing what to do with my body, but not touching me. Given it was just a figment of my imagination, I don’t bother too much about it - not knowing yet what these kinds of entities might do to me in the future.
At the festival there, far more pertinent to me is the fact that one of Rasmus’ previous girlfriends, who I just met, is suddenly really into me. I don’t find her particularly attractive, but when I notice that Rasmus starts talking to me in a far more open and respectful way, then I decide to run with it.
So my life goes into a psychedelic gear.
