Reviews for West of Jesus

San Francisco Chronicle | Finding God While Looking for Waves
Freelance journalist and author of the novel "The Angle Quickest for Flight" (a Chronicle best-seller in 2000), Steven Kotler is a seeker. "My earliest childhood belief," he writes in his new book, a surprisingly entertaining nonfiction account of his own spiritual quest through surfing, "was the sneaking suspicion that the world was a much more mysterious place than people were letting on." Searching for the secrets to that "mysterious place" took him to Santa Fe, N.M., where he sampled what seems to be the entire spectrum of mystical endeavors, including "ashrams, monasteries, strange teas, strange mushrooms, Sanskrit chants, [and] Native American medicine men with headdresses made from whole otters." The result? "I never, not once, achieved a mystical anything."

That kind of deadpan honesty is a big part of this book's charm. But Kotler did, eventually, find the transcendence he'd been seeking, on a surfboard at San Francisco's Sunset Beach. He credits surfing with curing his spiritual malaise and, in fact, the Lyme's disease that has plagued him for years: "At a time when everything else was gone, when nothing made sense and nothing worked, when suicide seemed a damn viable option, surfing saved my life - and I wanted to know why."

His journey to the heart of "why" propels this well-written and unfailingly interesting book. As the subtitle suggests, "West of Jesus" is a book aboutsurfing, but it's really a multifaceted exploration of the nature of faith and belief.Kotler makes a strong case that the desire for some version of the religious experience is universal and that the manifestations of that desire are as varied as life itself. He notes, in one of the book's many provocative asides, that 70,000 people in Australia listed "Jedi" as their religion on a recent census - that's Jedi as in "Star Wars" ("Much of Jedi thought is an updated version of Taoism" ). Now if Yoda and the power of the Force can serve as the basis for religious fervor, then surely riding one of nature's most elemental and powerful forces on a piece of fiberglass can qualify. (Indeed, as Kotler points out, Christian missionaries frowned upon surfing when they set up shop in 19th century Hawaii; perhaps they saw the activity as competition for their own vision of the divine.)

The book is an odd combination of narrative, memoir and reportage, though it's the last element that makes the book so interesting. The narrative at work is Kotler's quest to track down the origins of a mythic story about a surfing shaman, "some guy who could control the weather and conduct the waves with some kind of baton made from human bone," a story he hears twice, on two different continents from two different people. The quest for the source of that story involves travel to New Zealand and Hawaii, discussions with surfing's practitioners and historians, and research into the ideas of religious scholars and philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists.

Which may make this book sound like a pretty gnarly ride. But thanks to Kotler's intelligence and clear, witty writing, it's not. Along the way, the reader learns about the incredibly complex mechanics of waves, the history of the religious impulse and the neurophysiology of religious experience. Kotler explains how Bruce Brown, the director of the surf movie classic "The Endless Summer," fudged the details of the world's most perfect surfing spots, thus creating one of surfing's enduring mythologies.

He includes a fascinating bit of American cultural history and the law of unintended consequences: how President Lyndon Johnson's Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 encouraged the influx of "spiritual leaders from religious traditions far beyond the Judeo-Christian playground," which is one reason that alternative religions became the rage in the 1960s and 1970s. He relates the intellectual underpinnings of the sensation that athletes (and others) call "in the zone" (the "flow state" in the terminology of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), when "time and space vanish, self vanishes and the now swallows us whole." And he provides a pretty good thumbnail history of Hawaii and New Zealand.

Pretty heavy stuff, perhaps, but "West of Jesus" is never dry, academic or pedantic. In fact, Kotler is often laugh-at-loud funny; he writes that a ratty campground in New Zealand is "like Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood if Mr. Rogers had been a three-pack-a-day smoker with a meth lab in his bathtub."

In the end, it turns out that mysticism, the quest for spirituality, is simply a part of life. Kotler writes that "most scientists now agree that our brains are wired for mystical experience." Which, he hastens to point out, does not prove or disprove the existence of God, but it does highlight the fact that transcendence is not that uncommon (meditators achieve it, but so do athletes, test pilots and people who endure near-death experiences, among others). His point is that we are all looking for it in some way or another. We all want, in the words of one of the surfers he interviews, "a momentary connection with something far beyond yourself." Kotler found that connection in surfing; some find it in God. But all of us, it seems, are looking for it.
-Timothy Peters

Village Voice / Best Summer Reads:
Kotler's tale starts slow and then, like a seasoned surfer calibrating his board to his ride, monumentally catches stride. It starts with the author, an out-of-work journalist, searching for a story, a journey, a question—anything to keep his life afloat—and seizing on the twice-heard legend of a mystical surfer who, with a human-bone scepter, controls the waves and the weather. What boarder, or writer, wouldn't want to discover the wand that conducts all confluence and coincidence? So Kotler becomes his own Conductor, piecing together the science of snowstorms and surf mechanics, immigration legislation and General Hospital, with increasing fluency. There's a serious rush to feeling the writer and the story peak, in perfect synchroneity. Call it mysterioso or the oceanic feeling, what Kotler's seeking is nothing less than the big explanation. C.B.

Los Angeles Magazine, June 2006
In April 2000, Steven Kotler discovered he had Lyme disease. Three years later, his health still shaky, girlfriend gone, and spiritual compass askew, the L.A. freelance writer decided to pack two surfboards and hit the world's beaches. In West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief, Kotler investigates a queer story he heard about a mythical surfer who could control the weather with a baton fashioned from human bone. The search takes him from Topanga to Oahu to New Zealand; along the way he encounters the oft-repeated response from his surfing brethren that "surfers can't control the weather." In the end "the Conductor" proves as elusive as the perfect wave, but the fun, of course, is in the hunt. West of Jesus is one of the smartest books ever about the sport and religion of surfing, packed with off-beach detours into Zoroastrianism, cloud seeding, and Jungian dream theory. Among the many unexpected treats: a debunking of the legendary surfing documentary Endless Summer, which was, it turns out, true neither to life nor, since the best surfing is in the winter, to its title.
-Robert Ito

Outside Magazine, June 2006
In West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origin of Belief, Los Angeles—based writer Steven Kotler recounts his three-year journey in search of the legendary Conductor, a man on a surfboard who’s said to control the waves with a baton made of human bone. It’s an old surfing myth, one told from Mexico to Indonesia, and in his hunt for its origins Kotler rummages through Maori history and Taoist texts as he samples swells throughout America and New Zealand. In the end he finds the source of the legend, but by then the Conductor has become secondary to Kotler’s quest for the spiritual side of surfing. He wants to know why catching waves offers Zen moments unavailable to, say, motocross riders. “There have been many theories about the spiritual nature of this sport,” he writes, “and most involve some form of watery communion.” It happened to Kotler—twice. He tasted transcendence, briefly, while surfing in Santa Monica and off Oahu’s North Shore. At those times he entered a world “where time slowed, where sound vanished, where vision worked in 360 degrees”—and wipeouts didn’t exist.
-Bruce Barcott

Publisher's Weekly:
After surviving a battle with Lyme disease, Kotler finds himself searching for a reason to live and turns to his love of surfing. The novelist (The Angle Quickest for Flight ) and journalist travels to Mexico, where he hears a story about a magical being called "the Conductor," who controls the surf. Having heard the same tale eight years earlier while surfing in Indonesia, Kotler decides to seek out the legend's source while researching the inherent mysticism of surfers and their sport. Detailing his journey and findings, Kotler creates a work that combines the most compelling elements of memoir, travelogue and scholarly abstract into an accessible tale of physical and mental adventure. Up for anything, Kotler seeks out big waves, bungee jumping and a risky helicopter ride. He also delves into far-flung topics: surfing's history, Joseph Campbell's work on myths, Jungian psychology, Zen Buddhism, government "weather modification" experiments and the religious beliefs of islanders like the Maori and Hawaiians. The book reaches its peak when Kotler focuses on the inner workings of the human brain. His reasoning of how genetic and biological factors combine with physical and emotional experiences to create the spiritual "funkytown" feeling unique to surfing is both enlightening and inspirational.

Seed Magazine
When grappling with what has become a dominant question of recent months—How can we understand the relationship between science and religion?—one option is to treat religious belief as a natural phenomenon and fair game for scientific explanation. Another tack is to treat them as what Stephen Jay Gould called “nonoverlapping magisterial” that ask completely different kinds of questions. Steven Kotler’s West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief falls squarely in the first camp, while Francis S. Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is in the second. Kotler’s book is a colorful, rambling memoir of his adventures in the world of surfing. Surfing, not just as a sport or a pastime: To the initiated, it is more like a folk religion, complete with myths, rituals and transcendental experiences.

Kotler describes all of this with tremendous verve and clarity, and sets out some intriguing ideas about their neuroscientific underpinnings, such as how the neurochemistry of emotion impacts our perception of the world, and the evolutionary roots of religious ritual.
-Mark Weiss:

Los Angeles Times / Sunday Book Review | June 11, 2006
THE SEARCH FOR NIRVANA: Catching a wave can be a sublime experience. “West of Jesus” — tell us why.

Steven Kotler's "West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief" is the ideal book for any readers who have ever asked themselves, "How did surfing take over my life?" Kotler brings us closer to the answers via a wild, globe-trotting journey in search of surfing's much-referenced but rarely discussed spiritual side.

Having been out of commission for two years while struggling with Lyme disease, Kotler is ill, depressed and on the brink of suicide when a friend offers to take him surfing. Despite the fact that he hasn't been in the water for six years, he decides to go. After only one wave, he's hooked again, and he begins surfing as regularly as his health will allow.

Before long, he starts to feel better, and he marvels at surfing's salutary effects: "Since a typical wave lasts about five seconds, a typical session produced about twenty-five seconds of actual wave-riding time. In the time during which surfing was saving my life, I totaled a little over an hour of actual surfing."

An hour's worth of wave riding — spread out over 18 months — is enough to pull him out of the physical and spiritual hole he's found himself in.

Then, in 2003, after a heavy wipeout in Mexico, he is consoled by a fellow surfer who tells him the story of "the Conductor," a mythical surfer who can control the weather with a baton made of bone. The story sounds familiar to Kotler, who realizes he's heard it before — seven years prior, in Indonesia, after a similarly bad wipeout. The coincidence piques his interest, and he decides to track down the story's roots, hoping that through an understanding of the story, he might also gain insight into how surfing effected such a powerful change in his life.

It's a conceit, and it wears thin at times, particularly when Kotler takes a multi-chapter detour to try to establish a date for the genesis of the Conductor story. Here he approaches his subject with the enthusiasm and flexibility of a conspiracy theorist, drawing from "General Hospital," military weather modification programs, the 1965 passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act and the release of the film "The Endless Summer" in 1966. Just when it seems as though Kotler is on the verge of, in his words, "following an idea right off the edge of the world," he brings the book back to earth with a surf trip to New Zealand. He doesn't make much progress on the Conductor story, but he does find fellow surf travelers, treacherous waves and places to stay.

As the central mystery and object of his quest — the white whale of the book — the Conductor story pales in comparison to Kotler's on-the-ground portrait of the surfari lifestyle. From California and Mexico to Bali, New Zealand and Hawaii, Kotler depicts the rituals, stories and traditions of surfing with a keen eye for detail and a wide-ranging curiosity. He's also got a knack for explaining the basics of surfing and waves without interrupting the flow — thereby making the book accessible to experienced surfers and neophytes alike.

Kotler's quest for the roots of the Conductor story eventually provides a vehicle, however rickety, for him to take us through some wildly varied territories and experiences, including bungee jumping, mystical visions and so-called near-death experiences. In the end, he delivers a plausible theory about why surfing appears to generate more transcendent states than other sports do — something about how a good ride in real surf brings together danger, novelty and pinpoint concentration, which can also trigger, apparently, mystical states.

Perhaps the lesson here is that you can't eff the ineffable. You can only paddle out and catch some waves for yourself. As for the quest, the heart of it might be best summed up in Kotler's impressions the day he first saw the Pacific Ocean, in Malibu, and noticed a pack of surfers bobbing in the lineup. "They seemed to have learned something the rest of us had missed — what that was I did not know, but I remember wanting to find out."

-Antoine Wilson is the author of the forthcoming novel "The Interloper" from Handsel Books/Other Press. He lives and surfs in L.A.

Joy Nicholson, author of Tribes of Palos Verdes and The Road to Esmerelda:
Laying to rest the myth of the illiterate beach boy, Kotler's absorbing book speaks to the kind of surfer/reader I've always known: intelligent, complex, curious, spiritually inclined, extraordinary. An unexpectedly moving treat,

'West' is just plain wonderful.

Andrew Newberg, author of Why God Won't Go Away:
A wonderful and engaging book, West of Jesus provides a unique window into the neuroscience of belief. Woven into an entertaining surf narrative, Kotler's quest will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the connection between sport and spirituality.

John Albert, author of Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates:
Steven Kotler's West of Jesus is a fascinating and enlightening journey, like a global surfing safari with the coolest professor you never had. A perfect companion for anyone's endless summer.