August 7, 2008 Thursday

West of Jesus by Steven Kotler

“They waited for most of the afternoon; there was no change, not even a ripple. Just when they were ready to leave – another ZAP, another lightning strike. The waves appeared in the exact spot where the lightning had struck. Of course they formed perfect tubes. They caught waves all afternoon, right up to the point when there were no more waves, they just stopped, just turned off, pond flat. That’s when they saw him. The old dude who conducts the waves with a baton made from a human bone. They tried to paddle out to the Conductor right then, but they never got there. The Conductor just seemed to drift away. It was the same the next day and the day after that. He was always there but he was always drifting away.”

Steven Kotler in West of Jesus chronicles his three-year quest to find the origin of the Conductor tale – the story of the mystical surfer who conducts the seas, swells, lightning, winds and waves with a baton of a human bone. In a seven-year span, Kotler had heard this fable twice, in two distant locations (Indonesia and Mexico). Both times he was surfing big waves in unfamiliar locations, wiped out, got dragged over coral and rock reefs and nearly drowned. When he finally paddled to safety, a companion paddled over from considerable distance to tell him that he had just been worked over by the Conductor.

Kotler’s quest takes us on an adventurous journey of waves, philosophy, spiritual reflection, scientific studies and just plain fun. When it begins, he is a journalist publishing articles in men’s magazines. He also has Lyme disease, which leaves him physically weak. At one low point a friend drags him to Sunset Beach in Santa Monica, the gentlest wave on the California coast, to go surfing. I’ve surfed this place. Believe me, the Patch in Bolinas is Bonsai Pipeline compared to this break. The experience revives him, knocks him out of his doldrums and he is back into surfing. Surfing had saved his life. He books a surfing trip to Mexico, has the bad wipe out and hears the Conductor story again. Now he is determined to find the origin of the Conductor tale and contemplate the lure of surfing.

Nobody he knows has ever heard of the Conductor story, there’s no surf literature about it and even the Joseph Campbell Foundation had nothing about it. Kotler breaks the story into its components to analyze each one:

• The surf quest,
• Hint of Eastern mysticism,
• Weather and wave control, and
• Flavor of tropical mythology.

The surf quest begins with Bruce Brown’s 1964 classic movie, The Endless Summer, which sets off quests by thousands of surfers to search all the shores of the world for the perfect wave. Kotler visited Bruce Brown and spent an afternoon surfing the Ranch with Dana Brown and Robert “Wingnut” Weaver.

Eastern mysticism came to America on October 14, 1965 with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of that year, which ended restrictive quotas and religious traditions from all over the world came to the United States, including Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, Buddhism and Zen. Surfers were into enlightenment and free love long before the beats and the hippies.

Kotler concluded that the Conductor myth must have been a combination of the quest for the perfect wave and the quest of spiritual enlightenment, thus putting the origin in the late sixties.

What about weather and wave control? Kotler gives us a compact history of weather controlling gods, myths as well as scientific efforts such as cloud seeding and Pentagon’s project “Popeye” to cause massive rain on Viet Nam to turn the Ho Chi Minh trail into impassable mud. To no avail, in 1977 an international treaty banned weather modification activities. Scientists had given up on controlling weather, “We just don’t know.”

Flavor of tropical mythology is the Polynesian connection. The Joseph Campbell Foundation was of the opinion that weather modification came from planting and fishing societies. The Maori, descendents of the great Polynesian migration that populated New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and possibly Easter Island, fit that description. Kotler traveled to New Zealand to investigate the Maori, to surf and to write an article on New Zealand skiing. Again he found nothing regarding the Conductor tale, but he managed to get pounded at Raglan, New Zealand’s famous two-mile left point break.

Through his journey Kotler explores and learns a great deal. He takes us through a series of informative and different topics regarding ancient cultures, religion, ritual, fear, out of body and near death experiences. The reader is in for a real treat because Kotler is well read on all these topics. For each one he sites the latest philosophical or scientific study. He finally concludes that surfing is spiritual and boils the uniqueness of the sport down to a two-step process: catching the wave and riding the wave.

Catching a wave, especially big waves, feels like falling off a skyscraper, the height, the speed, the foreignness of the water, the vulnerability of being solo and the ferocity of the ocean produce a heightened adrenaline state. Riding the wave requires pinpoint concentration at a religious, meditative level. The sense of self disappears, time slows down and the feeling of oneness with the surrounding elements takes over. In surfing you go from a heightened fearful state to catch the wave directly into a Zen-like focus to ride the wave. No other sport has this combination of adrenaline to meditative rush.

Here are some examples leading up to the two-step combo of surfing. In New Zealand, Kotler encounters Grant a 300-pound Maori river guide who believed the only way to get the attention of the gods was through risk. “Got to be blood on the line.” This leads Kotler into a discussion of fear in religions and modern rituals of fear such as skydiving, bungee jumping and big wave drops and the chemical reactions in the brain during heighten states of fear.

Back in Santa Monica, Kotler has one incredible wave where everything connects, time slows down, sound stops, and he experiences freeze fame 360-degree vision. It only happened once and led to a discussion of out of body and near death experiences.

Kotler then goes into tales of super human feats during death threatening situations. The human brain during these moments drastically limits the amount of information, shuts down sound and memory to focus on the impending threat. A similar phenomenon occurs when athletes are “in the zone”. For Larry Bird at critical times in a game, the court goes quiet and players seem to be moving in slow motion.

Kotler finally travels to Hawaii. He had been avoiding it because of a commitment made to his dead friend Chris Marchetti, who had taught him to surf at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. He promised Chris he would ride Chris’ favorite “Bonzer” board in the big waves on the North Shore of Oahu. Kotler connects with Tom Stone, a Pipeline surfer of the sixties, professor of Polynesian culture and who at age 54 has two surf companies that sponsor him. Kotler gives us some great insights into Hawaiian history and culture. He does manage to surf the North Shore on Chris’ Bonzer board and he does discover the origin of the Conductor myth, which he finds in the basement of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

“And every now and again someone rattles the bones of the past in the direction of the future in hopes that a wave will rise.”

It’s a great read. I give it five stars.