West Of Jesus

I just finished an incredible book that I highly recommend called "West Of Jesus" by Steven Kotler. No, this isn't some cheesy contemporary-Christian b.s. Kotler is actually Jewish. This book is about: surfing/surf movies, Lyme disease, radiohead, Eastern religions/yogic arts in the U.S., near-death/out of body experiences, sports medicine, government weather control experiments, Joseph Campbell and his theories on the "hero" archetype, Maori/Polynesian culture, and neuroscience. Confused yet? Actually, all is relative; that becomes apparent in this book. This book is essentially about the origins of spirituality, how and why we perceive spirituality and mortality, and how one journalist goes to the ends of the earth to investigate these topics concomitantly through his love of surfing. Not unlike "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (which Kotler also references), this book totally captured my interest and imagination from cover to cover. I have never read such an intelligent piece on surfing, religion, and philosophy, and how it relates to our human condition. But don't think that you have to enjoy surfing to appreciate this book. There's so much more to it. Kotler loves, respects, fears, and is behumbled by the sport, and ultimately recovers from Lyme disease through it. I can relate to his passion for it; I love surfing too, have loved it since high school when I taught myself how to surf. Funny thing is, I was never a "surfer" in high school. Being that I graduated from a high school only 3 blocks from the beach, surfers ruled the school, and the majority of them were mean-spirited, arrogant, snotty little shits. Quentin Tarantino summed it up best in his description of the epic surf film, "Big Wednesday", in which he stated "this movie is too good for surfers", meaning that the film was so good, surfers didn't deserve to call it their own; you see Tarantino grew up in Southern California where he and his friends were tormented by surfers. But, back to the point, this book really got me thinking about why we as a culture get locked into certain mental pathways/mindsets, and what shapes our thought processes. If you like this book, you also need to watch "What The 'Bleep' Do We Know". It'll blow your mind...............dude.



(In the photo above, the man on the left is none other than Mr. Pipeline, Gerry Lopez, the man who conquered Hawaii's Bonzai Pipeline. Bit of trivia - he had small roles in the films "Big Wednesday" and "Conan The Barbarian", directed by surfer/director John Milius)