From Sue Phillips on the parallels of Nowhere and a recent Buddhist Retreat:

On the face of it the two couldn't be more different or have 2 more
different purposes.

A Theravada retreat is mostly silent, involved a lot of sitting and
walking vipasanna meditation, is 'serious', and meant to accomplish an
equilibrium in your daily life.

Nowhere (on the face of it) is an exercise in community 'participation',
doesn't involve a lot of silence, is not meant to be 'serious' (at least
not in the same way) and is meant in some ways to shake you out of your
day to day life.

However, they're both meant to challenge you and your attitude to your
life and your reactions to others.

During a retreat, you are encouraged to meditate on the way 'learned'
knee-jerk reaction to things – in normal life, xxxx happens, you react
by doing yyyy. Nothing happens between the 2. The yyy reaction to xxx is
a habit, pure and simple. It could be said that the process has come
about over the years of your life by wiring or patterning the synapses
in your brain directly from xxx to yyyy. The x>y response could be
appropriate but may not be, it could even be destructive.
The retreat is a time to examine the responses and to a certain extent
re-pattern them into less negative or destructive responses. The hope
being that with enough meditation, the mind can be 'rewired' to be more
open, less destructive or even just more thoughtful and at peace, out in
the 'real world'.

After returning from Nowhere I feel a similar 'disjointedness', trying
to assimilate everything into my day to day life; processing thoughts
and reflections and trying to hold on to the openness and the more I
think about it, the more convinced I am it's because Nowhere really is
an (unconscious) meditation. Deep down it has a similar structure to a
retreat; lots of people thrown closely together for a short period, a
'structure' – participation, lnt, self expression, no commerce, sharing,
gifting, etc., all of which 'force' your mind into 'rewiring' mode. You
cannot just do yyy when someone does xxx at nowhere, part of Nowhere is
that when someone does xxx you stop and think about it in the context of
Nowhere and then act accordingly. Not surprisingly, a lot of the time,
the resulting act will be zzzz not yyyy – you've started to rewire your
brain.

The literally 'unthinkable' becomes thinkable and you can never loose
it! That possibility is now hard-wired into your mind as a possible
reaction to xxxx and stays with you in the default world. What's this
got to do with Nowhere and spirituality?? Well, on a simplistic level
it's explains the 'life changing' aspect that's often claimed for BM
type events over more 'normal' festivals which seldom offer the
structure to challenge every-day wiring. But I think it goes deeper than
that. The 'structure' of Nowhere carries on after you get home.
Obviously all of us 're-run' Nowhere in our heads when we get home,
providing another opportunity for more 'rewiring', but the community of
wiki, mailing lists, flicker pages, decompression, parties etc, helps in
a way too, to strengthen that rewiring.

In your post, you said:

I think that that's the nub of it, except that Nowhere also gives you a
safe space to be brave and try out what was previously 'unthinkable' in
a literal not just figurative way. Not just in the 'going naked for the
first time' way but in a way that's even more dangerous in the default
world – it's a safe space to try out reactions that on the face of it
have little place in our daily lives, safe because everyone else is
trying to structure their thoughts and actions according to the same
principles (or should be). It also (as you said a little later), means
that it's a safe space to acknowledge that we ourselves are often
responsible for our own problems and those of others, a place that we
can acknowledge that and because forgiveness comes pretty easily from
others, we can learn to forgive ourselves too and forgive others.

Basically Nowhere is a hedonistic, spiritual retreat that makes you
rewire your brain.