1: Steven Kotler was ill. It was the end of the road.
“All I would be from this point forward was a burden to my family and friends,” he writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer.
“I had a sizable collection of barbiturates in the bathroom, a couple of bottles of whiskey in the kitchen. Suicide became a very real possibility. It was no longer a question of if; it was just a question of when.”
Three years earlier, when he was 30, he had gotten Lyme disease.
“For those unfamiliar, Lyme is like the worst flu you’ve ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia,” he writes. “Physically, I could barely walk across a room. Mentally, it was worse. The technical term for this is ‘brain fog.'”
He had lost the ability to focus. He likens it to “trying to think through cotton candy.”
But that’s not all: “Then the insomnia set in, the paranoia, and the depression,” he recalls. “My vision failed next. Long-term memory vanished. Short-term as well. And on and on.”
His doctors had taken him off of medicines because his stomach lining was bleeding out. “There was nothing else they could do for me. I was functional less than an hour a day.”
2: In the middle of this darkness, one of Steven’s friends showed up at his house. She told him she was taking him surfing.
“It was, of course, a ridiculous request,” he writes. “I could barely walk, let alone ride waves. But my friend was insistent. She wouldn’t shut up, and she wouldn’t leave. After hours of her badgering, I couldn’t take it anymore.”
He looked at her and said: “What the hell. Let’s go surfing. I can always kill myself tomorrow.”
They went to Sunset Beach in Los Angeles. “Which may be the wimpiest beginner wave in the world,” Steven recalls. The bigger the surfboard, the easier it is to surf, so she gave him a board “the size of a Cadillac.”
It was a warm day. The waves were small, and the tide was out, which meant they could wade out into the water.
“Which was a good thing, since my friend had to all but carry me out there.”
Moments later, a wave appeared on the horizon.
“Muscle memory took over,” he recollects. “I spun my board around, paddled twice, and popped to my feet. I dropped into that wave, then dropped into another dimension—one that I did not even know existed.”
Everything was strange.
“The first thing I noticed was that time had slowed to a crawl,” Steven writes. “My brain appeared to be working at normal speed, but the world was going by in freeze frame. My vision was panoramic. It felt like I could see out of the back of my head. Then I realized I didn’t seem to have a head. Or not exactly. There was a body traveling on a surfboard across a wave, but the rider was missing. My sense of self had vanished. My consciousness had expanded outward.
“I had merged with the ocean, become one with the universe—because, you know, that happens.”
But that wasn’t the strangest part.
“The oddest part: I felt great,” he recalls. “For the first time in years. The pain was gone. My head was clear, my mind sharp, my suicidal tendencies a thing of the past.”
The experience felt so powerful that he caught five more waves that day.
3: “Afterward, I wasn’t just destroyed, I was disassembled,” he remembers. “My friend drove me home, carried me into bed, and I didn’t move for two weeks. People had to bring me food, because I was too exhausted to walk the fifty feet to my kitchen to make a meal.
“Yet, on the fifteenth day, the first day that I could walk, I bummed a ride from a neighbor, went back to the beach, and did it again.”
And it happened again: “A radically powerful altered state of consciousness out in the waves, a bedraggled, extinguished version of myself afterward. But something had changed, and I knew it. So I slept for another ten days, went back to the ocean, and did it again. And again.”
For the next eight months, Steven continued to surf and have “these quasi-mystical experiences while out in the waves.”
He felt better. Healthier. Much healthier.
“I went from being functional 10 percent of the time to functional 80 percent of the time,” he writes.
What was happening didn’t make any sense at all.
“For starters,” Steven writes. Surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions.
“Second, I was a science guy, a hard-core rational materialist. I didn’t have mystical experiences, and I certainly didn’t have them while surfing.”
As an experienced journalist, Steven did what he had been trained to do.
“I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell was happening to me. I didn’t know what was going on in the waves, but I knew that one part of that experience—the becoming-one-with-everything part—was classified as “mystical.”
What he wanted to know was: “Could science tell me anything about the mystical?”
And: “Could anyone tell me why the mystical was showing up in surfing?”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Have I ever had any “mystical” experiences? If so, what were the circumstances? The conditions?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
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