Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Our pursuit of objective reality is precisely that—a pursuit. Reason is a horizon, as Kant explained. We can’t ever get there. It’s something we chase but never attain. In attempting to take it all in, we experience the pleasure and agony of the sublime, the sense that things are bigger and more awe-inspiring than we can ever begin to imagine. The sublime is what happens when the dream of trying to comprehend reality, of getting tantalizingly closer to some ever-receding understanding, leaves us dazed on some dusty Florida side street of the mind.

  * * *

  1. I’ve changed her name so she won’t lose her job.

  2. I looked into whether St. Augustine boasts a higher proportion of longer-lived residents than elsewhere, but couldn’t find it on any of the top-twenty lists of American cities where people live the longest. However, a purportedly secret society billed as “protectors of the Fountain of Youth” claims to have been granted superlongevity resulting from their work.

  11

  Let’s Run into the Waves and Spring Back to Life

  I don’t think that all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the three times will criticize me for giving you a little secret, that there is no need to go somewhere else to find the wonders of the Pure Land.

  —Thich Nhat Hanh, A Guide to Walking Meditation

  I felt as the dead feel. . . . I suspected myself to be in possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “History of Eternity”

  ON A summer day several months after I first met with Martha Morano, my request to interview David Copperfield on Musha Cay was officially declined. A representative from his public relations agency, Polaris, sent the following note: “Martha forwarded us the information on your forthcoming book, and your request to interview David Copperfield. He’s been in the research phase since acquiring the island, and until that research is completed, he’s not ready to discuss his findings with the media. We do appreciate your interest, however, in talking to David for the book, and wish you the best with the project.”

  The morning that e-mail arrived, I sat there reading it over and over. His findings. The research phase. What had he found? Checking Google news for any developments, I came across an interview in which he jokingly claimed to be eighty-two years old. “I want to be the first 150-year-old magician,” he was quoted as saying.

  While I was exploring the possibility of hiring a Caribbean privateer to help me find his fountain, an e-mail arrived from Martha: “I would not give up on this. It was necessary to include his personal PR agency, but I can work on David from my end. There is time and I will be with him in the next few months and will talk to him about it. He really should do this.”

  While she did that, I kept hunting for the fountain. I tried Saratoga Springs, the sulfur springs of Saint Lucia, the mineral baths at Clifton Springs in the Finger Lakes region. My sessions in these baths were relaxing, but all I really found was a laminated poster of Night trailing her train of stars, shhh-ing with a finger to her lips, as though saying, “Keep the mystery sacred.” Giving it one last shot, I visited California’s fountain of youth. It is found on the grounds of the Esalen Institute, a New Agey retreat center in Big Sur affectionately known as the Court of Last Resort. “At the heart of this temple of Nature, the springs pour forth warmth from the womb of the Earth,” as one description has it. “The baths are literally fountains of youth.”

  The Institute offers such courses as “Vision Seeker,” “Wild Serenity,” and “The Spiritual Ecology of Business.” With its creativity-unleashing seminars and other participatory workshops, Esalen is a mecca for avant-education that, according to its website, offers no assurances of change. The lack of guarantees hasn’t stemmed the hajjes for transformation. Each year, around ten thousand pilgrims make their way to Esalen’s university of the waves. Disciples visit for various reasons: new beginnings, sunrise meditations, high-octane contemplation, to get certified as massage therapists—or simply to soak in the hot springs. (The mineral pools are open to the public from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. nightly.)

  Those baths, like the rest of the area, are portrayed as “dramatically charged” in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s 2007 academic survey Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. “Both the personal risks and the promises of adventure are quite real here,” he writes, “and the powerful currents that flow just under the surface of things, like the explosive hot springs, should never be underestimated.”

  Esalen is considered a world navel, or an energy center, as any place where people pay for change usually is. Change is, after all, painful. The charge for a seven-day workshop and a private, premium room is $3,515. (Sleeping on a bunk bed in a dorm room brings the price down to $1,360. Offering to do grunt work on the grounds knocks off another $100.)

  Esalen was founded by Americans who’d spent time studying under the yogi Sri Aurobindo, who said that coupling spirituality with eroticism leads to “a supernal fulfillment and an infinite satisfaction in the all-possessing bliss of the Infinite.” His teachings suggested the possibility of achieving physical immortality through sexual-spiritual transformations. Some devotees interpreted this as meaning they would literally never die. These diehards were astonished each time someone in the ashram died. “I firmly believed that death was impossible here,” explained one of them, when another died. At funerals, sadhaks would turn to each other and say, “I have the feeling that this will not happen to me.” When Aurobindo died, in 1950, a segment of the movement remained convinced he hadn’t actually passed on.

  As a central gathering place for the Human Potential Movement, Esalen still attracts those willing to explore what onetime lecturer Aldous Huxley called the “human potential,” the belief that within each of us lies the latent possibility of reaching the divine source of all existence. Fulfilling this potential is challenging, but not impossible, argued the psychologist Abraham Maslow, another early Esalen figurehead. For Maslow, our greatest potential is self-actualization, the ultimate state in his hierarchy of needs. One can only ascend to the pyramid’s apex, he wrote, through the intensity of peak experiences, with their “feelings of limitless horizons opening up.”

  A prime place for such a peak experience is Esalen’s baths. “The operative word is hot,” as Maslow noted. “This place is hot.”

  * * *

  My drive up the vertiginous Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur took place during a rockslide thunderstorm. Clumps of unfiltered mountain dribbled from the hillsides onto the dark, wet road. Afternoon became night. I went slowly to avoid all the stones in the way. It took me nine hours to get from Silver Lake to Esalen, double the normal time.

  If the storm hadn’t been so intimidating, I might have been better able to appreciate its beauty. Electrical currents pulsed through the cloud base over the ocean. Green, white, and orange Valkyries galloped across the sky. At one point, my car felt as if it had been hit by lightning. I started imagining the obituary headline: “Canadian Nonfiction Writer Dies Researching Immortality.”

  Trying to stay focused, I listened to Daft Punk’s Alive. It started with two computerized voices, one saying “human,” the other saying “robot.” As the tempo increased, the words overlapped: humanrobot, humobot, hrubot, rhoman, until man and machine merged into cyborgs. I’d been driving so slowly for so long I, too, was turning bionic.

  Shortly after 1:00 a.m., a demure brown sign popped up from the foliage: ESALEN: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. At the bottom of the sloping driveway, an attendant in a candlelit wooden shack checked me in and gave me the key to my room. I parked next to a sea-foam Jaguar with a SEEKR license plate. Outside the car, the ocean was screaming. Swaths of senses were missing. All I could smell was wet salt. My hands were still shaking from the drive. I groped through the rain-strewn obscurity, threw my belongings into the appointed cabin, and headed out to find the fountain.

  It was still pouring, but the clouds were breaking slightly, allowing the moon to peek through. At the bottom
of the stairs, near a picnic table, a young man stood alone, smoking a joint. I asked for directions to the springs. A large, brown moth sat perched on his shoulder. The man pointed to a path along the cliffside. As I thanked him, he gestured at my shorts. “By the way, you won’t be needing those.”

  * * *

  Nudity without shame is the sort of goal Esalen helps its visitors attain. I knew the springs were clothing optional, but it hadn’t quite dawned on me that everybody would be in naturabilis. As I picked a towel from the stack in the open dressing room, a Rubenesque woman strolled past wearing nothing but an oversize hat that flopped around her neck like a big fried egg. Outside, around twenty wet, naked bodies steamed in the rain.

  I hung up my jacket and was unbuttoning my shirt when an East European couple walked in from the “silent” baths area toward the “quiet” baths area. They stopped and said hello. He was tall and had a broad smile; she was petite and had squinty eyes. They were both naked. Despite the faint light, I could tell they were tripping.

  “How’s the water?” I asked.

  “The hot springs will make you tall—she doubled in size!” he said, putting his hand on her head.

  She looked up, toweling off. “Soon I’ll be so big I won’t fit anymore!” she managed, starting to laugh uncontrollably.

  I hung my pants up, folded everything else, showered quickly, and made my way toward the shiveringly cold baths area. My hands kept instinctively covering my loins. A few silhouettes lay bobbing in the first pool, so I self-consciously climbed into a larger one at the end of the path.

  The liquid was unlike anything else I’d ever been in. The oily heat felt muscle-melting. The minerals, viscous at first, dried on my skin within seconds. Submerging myself, they’d fade back into primordiality. It was like being in a womb, slathered in placental gel. The vitality was tangible. The water couldn’t, obviously, morph anybody into a twenty-three-year-old, but I could see why people considered it a fountain of youth. Something about its fluidity was volatilizing. Sitting in the slippery, sulfuric waters while the Pacific Ocean unfurled into a sooty horizon, I felt the life-giving destructiveness of it all, civilization behind me, gnashing waves in front, howling rains above. Water on all sides: beneath, around, within. The darkened ocean seemed to be teeming with galleons. Two black clouds were the sky’s unblinking eyes.

  The springs had an undeniable effect. Seeping naturally from the craggy cliffside, they have medicinal attributes that natives knew about thousands of years ago. This was considered a power spot by indigenous North American tribes such as the Salinan, Rumsen, and Esselen—after whom Esalen was named. The place had almost been called Tokitok Lodge to commemorate the Esselen word for “the god in the springs.”

  Two of my pool’s other denizens had become quite talky-talky. Middle-aged and gay, they spoke in petulant lilts about recent parties at the institute. “I was watching you the other night,” said one of them, “and I was wondering how you felt having all three of those guys on you at the same time?”

  His friend, chin perched on the tub’s rocky side, considered the question at length before answering. “I felt . . .,” he said, finally, “grounded. So grounded.”

  “Grounded how—like an electrical socket?” asked his companion.

  I stepped out of the tub. It was around 2:00 a.m. My spume-covered glasses gave everything an aquarium-like quality. It had been frigid getting in; with those minerals caked into my skin, it didn’t feel cold anymore. I took a shower and then went for another soak in a nearby empty pool.

  A few minutes later, an olive-skinned lady with pale-gray wolf eyes and frizzy hair joined me. We started talking. The topic turned to immortality. She said that every LSD trip she’d ever done had granted her an experience of eternity. “This much is certain: immortality is something you feel when you are in the creative womb. And coming to Esalen means entering the creative womb.”

  She herself had come to learn shamanism 101. She told me that gathering the events of one’s life into a scrapbook or writing a memoir can be a means of preparation for the afterlife. Such work isn’t done for earthly posterity, she said, but rather to facilitate admission into the concrete realm of infinity. I asked her how one goes about becoming a shaman in this day and age. She said that the first step is being initiated.

  “In some sort of ritual?” I asked.

  “There aren’t too many authentic shamanic initiation rituals left,” she explained. “The initiation usually takes place in your dreams. Even in the past, the process often happened asleep. In dreams, the shaman would be transported to a place beyond living and dying. Then they’d meet some god or goddess who would initiate them. And then they’d wake up back on earth, beginning a new chapter of their lives.”

  * * *

  That night, I dreamed of a woman with long, white hair. We were in a rainy garden. She started telling me about a book full of wisdom, knowledge, and secret insights. “Where can I find this book?” I asked.

  “Right here.” She pointed at a dot in the air. The spot flashed open, becoming a rectangular portal. Her other hand moved invitingly toward it. Light poured into view. As I stepped through the hole she had opened in the sky, I woke up.

  * * *

  A French ethnographer named Arnold van Gennep coined the term rite of passage in 1908. He considered portals to be symbolic of the entire shift from one stage of life to another, as we can only move from the old reality into a new one by crossing a threshold. “Whoever passes from one to the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds,” van Gennep wrote. These areas of transition, he added, are found in all ceremonies accompanying the passage from one social position to another.

  The roots of the word initiation are “to begin.” It ushers in a new phase. In many religions, initiatory rites have to do with immortality. The ritual of baptism, to pick one well-known example, prepares Christian souls for rebirth in the afterlife. And at ancient Greek mystery schools, aspirants were initiated into the basics of eternal life. Although we don’t know exactly what happened at those rites (divulging the mysteries was punishable by death), it is clear that worshippers died, symbolically, and were then reborn with assurances about immortality to come. “Initiation and death correspond word for word and thing for thing,” explained Plutarch.

  In many cases, those being hazed would attain a state of ecstatic madness in which they became one with their God. This apotheosis brought a foretaste of spiritual immortality, an intimation of a birth in death, proof of the indestructibility of the soul. The profound realization that dying begets new life didn’t come painlessly. There was often, Nietzsche wrote, an “eruptive character” to these initiations. They could involve mutilation and scarification, being burned by torches, cut with fangs, or stung by ants. These ordeals were designed to be sufficiently scary for participants to feel sure they had died. The deprivation and torture endured was meant to cause “a regressive disorganization of the personality.” Once broken down, they could be reassembled into a newly formed grown-up no longer afraid of dying.

  An extraordinary example of such a coming-of-age ritual was documented in the 1920s among Australian aboriginals, specifically the Pitjantjatjara people of the western deserts. The first stage entailed being covered in the blood of elders for a year or so. The old men cut open their veins with sharpened wallaby bones and drenched the young initiate. They made extra sure the running blood covered his penis. For the next lunar cycle, the youth could eat nothing but coagulated blood.

  Some initiates would then cut an incision into the underside of their penis, so that it resembled a menstruating vagina. Géza Róheim’s account of a urethral-cutting ceremony in The Eternal Ones of the Dream notes that this “penis womb” permitted the initiate to give birth to himself as a grown man. “We are not afraid of the bleeding vagina—we have it ourselves,” cried the initiates. “It does not threaten the penis, it is the penis.
”

  Undergoing all of these blood communions allowed initiates to become something greater than themselves. They got so gone—matted down with bloody feathers, producing quartz crystals from their mouths, their subincisions rendering them fully indifferent toward death—that they started to feel an at-one-ment with their immortal ancestors. The old men lifted the young initiates’ fear of death by bringing them as close as possible to their nightmares.

  Simply reading about such harrowing trials may also affect us, even though we don’t undergo the ritual ourselves. Consuming a tragedy (as a viewer or a reader) can be as powerful as any initiation. The ancient Greeks called this vicarious purging katharsis. A story’s cathartic moment has the ability to thrust us into a new phase of life. Transfigurative images can arise with equal strength from within or without, whether in actual rituals or in dreams or in stories.