In the past, initiates the world over were forced to come to terms with death as a way of growing up. Our society today no longer has such clear-cut rites of passage. Certainly sports hazings, as well as bands and gangs, offer contemporary adolescents an opportunity to undergo the ancient magic of disentangling themselves from childhood. But such experiences rarely, if ever, implicate society as a whole, and the youths going through it often have no one guiding them. Nor is anything waiting for them on the other side of the rite. As a result, the innate urge to boggle the senses (through drugs, piercings, or tattoos) becomes devoid of any context or transformative effect.
Lacking proper initiation rites, our civilization lacks adults. This may be why our society is so fixated on youth, despite the plethora of studies showing how youths are, on the whole, unhappier than adults. Most grown-ups never learned how to sever the psychic umbilical cord chaining them to infancy. We long for perpetual adolescence rather than maturing into subsequent phases of life. We want the fountain of youth, not reality.
Being initiated means bearing what we can’t change: dying. But there will always be something within the collapse, a fountain in the rocks. This geysering energy is renewal, transfiguration, Eros: the life force.
* * *
With my dream of the portal in mind, I signed up for an Esalen seminar led by the depth psychologist Bill Plotkin. His bio said he specialized in nonordinary states of consciousness and nature-based individuation programs. He’d guided many people through initiatory rites in the wilderness. Our workshop would be a form of initiation.
It took place across campus, inside a former family home, in a big living room with ocean-view bay windows. A black swath of silken fabric spangled with golden stars and crescent moons had been spread over the middle of the floor. On it lay an assortment of objects: pinecones, seashells, some pebbles. There were about fifteen students in total.
Bill Plotkin sat meditating with a rigid intensity until everyone settled in. We positioned ourselves on jumbo, saffron-colored pillows. Plotkin, whose chiseled, gaunt face was topped by an almost glam-rock shock of white hair, began by telling us how he had once met death in an alcove. I, alongside a few others, sat taking notes. As he spoke, he shifted his gaze around the room. He didn’t seem to be looking at us, but rather through us, or past us, the way cats peer into other dimensions, seeing shadow selves.
He explained that he would be our vision-quest guide, our underworld escort, but we’d need to do the actual transformative work alone. He warned that such experiences are often powerfully life-changing. Some of us, he said, might collapse into something called “caterpillar soup.” Here he licked his lips. He’s the sort of person, he explained, who hears the word dismemberment and thinks, Oh, yummy!
Plotkin told us how, in August 1980, he’d trekked into the Colorado wilderness looking for a magical healing stick—“an instrument of great power, capable of transforming others by the simple wave of my wizardly arm.” Instead of a wand, after four days of fasting, he found himself. It happened when a large yellow butterfly flew toward him, fluttered right up into his face, brushed his cheek with its wing, and whispered “Cocoon Weaver.”
As he shared the story, I thought he might be joking. But then he said the name had saddened him—until he came to understand his calling: “My soul wants me to weave cocoons of transformation for others. People have to decide to go into the cocoon. I wanted a magic wand to change people, but they need to do it themselves. I can only point the way. Once I saw the power of it, I was terrified. And I still am.”
The waves were rioting outside. When a gale of wind blew the shutters open, a fellow workshopper exclaimed, “Whoa, that’s a lot of power.” Moments later, the lights in the compound went out.
“Yes, we are here on the edge,” intoned Cocoon Weaver, his voice rising. “The edge of the continent, the edge of consciousness. Allow yourself to feel dizzy.” He wanted us to get discombobulated, to revel in the vertigo. When the lights came back on, my head was tilted upward. I opened my eyes and noticed the word bliss etched into the paint on a grate in the ceiling. Getting into the spirit of things, I imagined removing the panel and crawling on in.
Weaver read a poem by Robinson Jeffers, a poet associated with these parts. It was about how the first living cell had echoes of the future in it, how the first bit of life knew its direction: forward.
Then, the time came to start the initiation. “What’s the price of admission in the new life?” Weaver asked. “The price is the life you’ve been living so far.” He took out a box of clay and told us to grab a handful. “I want each of you to sculpt the shape of your life. Don’t think about it too much, just see what comes out, but be mindful that you are giving a form to your life up until this point. While you make it, think of all the people you have loved, do love, will love, and want to love.”
We each took our allotment of clay and molded it. I made a water drop: a smooth, imperfect droplet the size of a small pear.
When we were done, Weaver told us that the rest of the ceremony needed to be completed alone, each of us by ourselves, outside in nature. “You are going to take the shape of your life that you have made and you are going to give it to the waters of life. You are going to sacrifice it—and your present-day self—to the mystery.”
We all shuffled out into the afternoon rain. I made my way to a bridge over a rushing creek whose waters poured into the ocean. Raindrops dripped down on the clay droplet of my life. Closing my eyes, I released the figurine into the rapids, where it was swallowed by froth and vanished into the sea.
* * *
That afternoon, I stopped for lunch at a place in Big Sur called Deetjen’s. Adjacent to the parking lot stood a little shack with a sign saying LIBRARY. After eating, I walked in to check it out. There was a bookshelf, a desk, a telephone, some knickknacks. I noticed a softcover by the mystic Rudolf Steiner, about something called the “spiritual science.” If we just concentrate hard enough, he argued, our soul can detach itself from the body and experience immortality. The way to do it is by focusing on symbolic images unlike anything in the real world (such as a portal filled with light) while simultaneously ignoring all one’s senses. With persistent practice, ordinary thinking patterns grind to a halt. A new, altered, sleeplike state of consciousness is attained in which the freed soul can commune with the eternal unknowable.
Putting Steiner’s book down, I noticed a piece of paper underneath the alabaster bust on the desk. “Realize you may die at any moment,” said the note. “Learn how to keep it in mind. He who has freed himself from the dream of tomorrow has attained what he came here for.”
On the short drive back to Esalen, I kept thinking about my car plunging off the cliff to the rocks below. The gray ocean was covered in blankets of fog. Mist tentacles wafted landward. Being freed from the dream of tomorrow; experiencing eternity in the present moment. As the ancient aphorism goes, Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediata et lucida fruitio rerum infinitarum: “Eternity is merely today; it is the immediate and lucid enjoyment of the things of infinity.”
How can we lucidly enjoy infinity? The Romantic poets claimed that it was through our imagination. Blake considered the world of imagination to be “what eternally exists, really and unchangeably,” that “which liveth for ever.” Only imagination permits us to see heaven in a flower. Wordsworth defined the imaginative as the part of us that is conversant with or turns upon infinity. He saw it as a visionary power, a mental glimpse of our indestructible selves.
The word infinitude is crucial to Wordsworth’s understanding of imagination. We come from infinitude, he felt, and there we end up: “Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, / Is with infinitude, and only there.” His Ode on the Intimations of Immortality calls birth a “forgetting.” Our soul forgets that it entered this world trailing clouds of glory from some immortal place. We can only rekindle this connection through our powers of imagination: “Though inland far we be, / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Whi
ch brought us hither, / Can in a moment travel thither.” Wordsworth often used water symbolism when discussing infinitude. According to Harold Bloom, “He constantly associates the sudden onset of the Imagination with the sound of rushing waters.”
Walt Whitman found it in lakes and at the seaside, and elsewhere, too. Merely contemplating a blade of grass gave him an unshakable conviction in eternal life. For what else is grass than life bursting from decay? “The smallest sprout,” he wrote, “shows there is really no death.” His Song of Myself is actually a song of ourselves living forever, “of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself. (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)” Whitman is deathless, and the reader is deathless, too. In his world, everything is deathless: “I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!”
Any insignificant object is a connection to this truth. Whitman tells us we can find God in the tiniest, most ordinary places. Grass, some barns, any old gnat, the breeze; all revelations. A little mouse “is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Unbelievers, he cries, all you have to do is look around to be convinced. Trees, seaweed, sparrows—all are immortal: “I swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul!”
This truth is omnigenous—meaning it is in all things. We can find it anywhere, in the hollows at the bottom of the sea, in rocky riverbeds, in dust. If we ever lose sight of it, we can find it simply, Whitman assures us, by looking under our boots. Just look. The message is all around us. “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Even if we can’t see it right away, we have the ability to see it. Finding it doesn’t mean we will understand it. “I hear and behold God in every object,” Whitman admits, “yet understand God not in the least.”1
For him, beholding God is akin to entering the Now. There “will never be any more perfection than there is now,” he writes, “Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” We can access the now anytime. Each moment—this moment—is the source of all creation. And when else shall we live if not now? Walt Whitman’s immortality isn’t in the afterlife. It’s not far off, later, or prolonged—it’s now, in every moment.
This same eternal now is the protagonist in The Story of My Heart, a cult-classic, 1883 memoir of immortality experiences by the British naturalist Richard Jefferies. It describes him sinking into timelessness while dipping his fingers into a brook, gazing upon blue pebbles on a beach, or sitting on a hillside tumulus. “Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning,” he wrote. “It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it.”
Modern neuroscience has shed light upon the notion of tapping into the now. In a series of experiments, the physiologist Benjamin Libet (1916–2007), author of Mind Time, demonstrated that our brain is out of step with reality. There’s a barely detectable delay between something’s happening and our awareness of its happening. According to his findings, it takes at least ten milliseconds for neuroprocessors to register sensory information. “We are not conscious of the actual moment of the present,” noted Libet. “We are always a little late.”
This micropause is not unlike what computer programmers call latency. When we record music into software, for example, it is never exactly in sync with the performance: there is an infinitesimal delay as the microchips convert the information codes into a binary approximation. We, too, are always a micro-blink off. Our consciousness only rarely plunges into real time, into what mystics call the stream of now. The censoring mind usually creates a schism between itself and outer existence. It is as though our brain is NBC, and reality is Janet Jackson’s exposed breast at a Super Bowl halftime show. In mystical experiences, the veil over our conscious mind experiences a wardrobe malfunction that thrusts us into the now, where we glimpse the bare nipple of existence.
* * *
During my last soak in the mineral pools at Esalen, I ended up in a conversation with a white-haired gentleman named Cornelius.
“Is this your first time at Esalen?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “How about you?”
Cornelius had been here countless times. He used to edit journals such as World Affairs and New Realities, he said, and had published works by Esalen legends such as Stanislav Grof. Cornelius was here deepening an integrative practice of connecting body and mind, he said, adding, “It’s all about consciousness.”
“What is consciousness?” I blurted out, immediately regretting that I’d asked something so impossible.
“Consciousness means being in the here and now,” he answered, perfectly comfortable with the question. “Consciousness is not accessible through analytical reasoning, which is why scientists don’t like it.”
There it was, simple as a blade of grass. “That’s a lot less heavy than what some of the people in my workshop want it to be. They’re trying to turn into caterpillar soup.”
“You know, it doesn’t need to be a bad trip to be a powerful trip,” Cornelius said. “In my years here, I’ve noticed that a lot of people who come to these sorts of spiritual retreats are negatively daemonaic.”
“What does that mean?”
“That they are negative daemons. They come here seeking light, but they bring their darkness with them wherever they go.”
“What about you?” I asked. “How come you seem so easygoing?”
“I’m an old spiritual eclectic.” He smiled. “And I’m here doing what are essentially stretching classes. I’m not undergoing some sort of radical transformative experience—which is what some of your classmates are here for.”
And what of my own journey? Had I transformed? I definitely hadn’t found the fountain I’d dreamed about. But then it occurred to me, as I took a timeless moment to jot things down, that the precise act of trying to stop time—scribbling naked into a tattered, mineral-water-splattered fig leaf of a notebook—was what I had come here to do. Whether or not I’d gone through an initiation rite, writing is itself an ongoing initiatory process. Crafting narrative is ritualistic, like prayer. It means sitting down day after day, sculpting structure, living the story trying to live its way through us.
The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner made a distinction between ritual liminars who move through the rite and those he called marginals: people with “no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity.” For some doctors, monks, psychologists, artists, and others (including writers), initiation can mean learning to constantly waver between worlds. The Greek term palingenesia refers to a recurrence of birth. The necessary corollary to continual rebirths is having to die repeatedly. Aldous Huxley called this “a perpetual perishing.” He considered it a necessary precursor to realizing one’s human potential—that foundational Esalen aim—that “transience that was yet eternal life.”
Having explored the outer limits of the belief in spiritual immortality, having followed Auntie Tiny’s funeral invitation, having entered the portal, I was now ready for the next part of the journey.
* * *
1. One of my favorite descriptions of God comes from my three-and-a-half-year-old friend Johanna Seligman, who says that God is from the future and wears a sparklesuit ’cause he’s a lady.
Part 2
Magic
“I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.”
“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.
—John Fowles, The Magus
12
Mystifier
My job is deceiving people, but I start out by telling my audiences that I am a professional deceiver, an illusionist, and that they shouldn’t believe anything they see, but that I’ll make them believe anyway. It’s a fair game. I don’t tell them, “Trust me.”
—David Copperfield
O brave new world
That has such people in’t.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest
AROUND THE time I�
��d finally given up on ever getting to David Copperfield’s fountain of youth, Martha Morano contacted me with a sleight of hand in mind. Could I write an article about Musha Cay for a magazine? My book’s description hadn’t hooked Copperfield, but if I helped Martha place a piece about his $32K-per-night private-island getaway, she’d help me get the story of the fountain.
A writer friend suggested I contact the editors at BestLife, a luxury fitness magazine run by the team at Men’s Health. They were actively looking for life-extension stories, he said, so Copperfield’s fountain of youth could be a perfect fit. They bit: a senior editor responded to my query letter immediately. Over the phone, he explained their demographic split in the following way: “Men’s Health helps eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds get the abs that get them the girls. BestLife is what they graduate to. It’s for thirty-five- to sixty-year-old men who’ve got the abs and the perfect girl and who want to hold on to both of them while making 150 to 350K and having the healthiest, wealthiest best life possible.” Both magazines were published by Rodale, founded by J. I. Rodale, a passionate life-extensionist. At the age of seventy-two, he declared on national television that he would live to one hundred. Moments later, he dropped dead of a heart attack.
“Musha Cay and the fountain of youth sounds like it could be a great story for BestLife,” wrote the editor in his commissioning letter. “We’re really interested in all things longevity, and I can see a bunch of ways that we might be able to turn this into a story. I think the best plan of action would be for you to go down and explore the island and then for us to regroup when you return.”
“This would work, I think,” Martha replied. “As soon as he meets you, I know he will not be so wary about the book interview.”
Book of Immortality Page 20