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Surfing, Science and the Religion of Skiing

How and Why You're a Believer

By Wayne Sheldrake

By his own accounting, Steven Kotler, author of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief, is not a professional surfer. But there came a day in his life, "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 . . .."

Kotler's saga of coming apart and the surfing quest it inspired began when he was afflicted with Lyme's Disease. The disease ravaged his life. "I could get out of bed but actually making it to the kitchen for coffee was an impossible task, so I would lie down on the floor . . . because I didn't have the strength to do anything else."

Then, somehow mustering the strength for a few short waves, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time: "just for one wave riding instant I felt the thrum of life, the possibility of possibility . . .."

How could it be that surfing felt like the answer?

Kotler couldn't accept that he was "following in the footsteps of surfers who, needing a way to justify their obsession, had draped it in a hodgepodge of mystical possibility." Still, in a moment, he began to take surfing the way many skiers take skiing - religiously.

Most brains believe in something, and most count on what they believe for help with their most important function: survival. But how is it, Kotler asked himself, that when he had lost faith in everything his brain suddenly came to believe that to survive he must surf? More important: "Why does anyone start to believe in anything?" he asked.

His very brainy answer fills in the blanks of belief for surfers and skiers alike. Surfing, like skiing, "requires an incredible amount of muscle memory." Surfers and skiers fixate on the nuances of stance, partly because proper stance increases the chances of not falling while dealing with a plethora of natural and technical variables. But also, a good stance gives you a better shot at a good ride, a better shot at feeling "the thrumb of life, the possibility of possibility."

Of course, when you're talking about muscle memory, you aren't really talking about muscles. You're talking about neurology - the brain. Kotler reminds us, "Evolution designed the brain to detect meaning." Meaning is especially vital when we are faced with inexplicably confusing or overwhelmingly fearful or just plan lucky-seeming events.

This in mind, a literal adjustment in Kotler's surfing stance opened up a new world. Epiphany hit. "The world vanished. There was no self. No other. For an instant I didn't know where I ended and the wave began." It was a religious-like experience for a man who had rejected religion.

Old surfers called the experience the glide, a peaceful "psychotropic" moment "staggeringly beautiful and simultaneously disappearing." They said, it felt like a gift from the gods. If the glide sounds like something ski bums might describe after a morning of powder runs, read on.

In Kotler's ever-rational mind, the glide is more akin to a runner's trance or flow - the point at which "words, time, and space vanish, self vanishes and the now swallows us whole." He observed, "the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost for the sheer sake of doing it." His onset of commitment inspires him to dig into the brain as source of transcendence.

He finds that the ability to flow is biological trait. Varying from individual to individual, spirituality itself is genetic. The tendency to religious experience became encoded in DNA because believing worked. It helped individuals put aside differences and combine their loyalties. From the dawn of time groups that shared a faith had the advantage of unity, unity meant power, power meant survival. Thus emerged the great religious traditions.

Religious spirituality still works. Kotler notes, "hundreds of studies done by hundreds of researchers have shown that spiritual people live longer and healthier lives than non-spiritual people." One study reported that "lack of religious involvement has an effect on mortality that is equivalent to 40 years of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day.'"

Why do you feel like skiing is your religion? Your brain has to. Without something to believe in, your brain knows it's dying faster than a brain that believes.

Kotler acknowledged he emerged from his disease via the power of believing. He believed and kept believing in surfing because it worked. He says, "One of the things that sets a surf quest apart from nearly all other such crusades is that sooner or later you actually find the omnipotent perfection in nature of great waves." His dedication was profound. At least once he chose surfing over sex when the opportunity interfered with the prospect of good waves.

To remain a believer, Kotler had to know how this transformation had happened.

As much as the brain is about seeking rare trance-like consciousness and relishing a glowing sensation of collective unity, the brain is also about pain, fear and failure. Brains love bliss, yes. But more often they are preoccupied with avoiding death.

As we might ask Why skiing? Kotler asked Why surfing?

Surfing, like skiing, is scary. Both can be a little scary, or they can be terrifying

When faced with threatening circumstances, the brain gives itself a chance. It kicks into survival mode, flooding the entire human system with endorphins. Simultaneously, it orders up painkillers, dopamine and norepinephrine.

The connection to surfing wasn't lost on Kotler when a neuroscientist told him, ". . . general scientific thinking is that the more fearful a certain sport makes you, the greater the release of these chemicals. The greater the release of these chemicals, the greater the addiction-like symptoms."

Surfing, like skiing, is a falling sport. You start way up somewhere - on a wave or a mountain - and you head down, fast. Fear of falling is, of course, hardwired. Brains evolved to fear it. To most brains, surfing and skiing tease, if not innervate this fear.

Kotler is told that fear also commands the brain to release adrenaline, which instantly primes the body for action by making "more blood available for our muscles to use." Those muscles are ready to kick ass or, if it seems like the better option, run like hell.

Bottom line: When kicking ass or bolting your brain and body are assaulted by stimulating and protective chemicals. If you get out alive, those chemicals surge through your system long afterwards, and it feels . . . it feels . . . it feels . . . like a gift from the gods.

To feel that way again you have to go scare yourself again, maybe a little more this time, with a bigger wave or a steeper mountain.

Most of us have heard this addicted-to-speed/danger/pain story before. We know that "the analgesic power of the principal endorphins released during times of stress can be a hundred times stronger than morphine."

But Kotler learns that extreme sports such as surfing and skiing boost serotonin levels, too - as good as acid and better than Prozac. At the same time, trance-like states may also be attributed to "high levels of anamide . . .." Keep up your effort long enough and anamide, which acts similarly to THC "the psychotropic ingredient in marijuana," is a by-product of exercise.

Thus the religious attachment to surfing or skiing is actually the brain incorporating one of its highest evolved functions. The brain employs or reacts to extreme experiences, stimulated or stimulating itself to states most useful for the fight and flight of survival, and states which correspond to the fulfilling security of faith-like cohesion.

Connecting all the dots in his brain, Kotler explains his reborn capability for hope and engagement and his remade his world outlook as a restructuring of his Lymes afflicted brain. "It was as if someone had swapped out my limbic system and given me a brand new one." Surfing, he claims, fostered the rewiring.

To his rational, it was not far fetched mysticism that brought the change and there was a studied model for it. Research shows that restructuring of the brain can happen in extreme conditions. For example, it happens to near-death survivors. They don't just suddenly adopt spiritually brighter attitudes because they thought they died and they got a second chance. Their brains change, structurally and chemically.

How did surfing become the source of meaning in Kotler's life? His new brain forced him to believe. Why worship skiing? Your brain is forced to.

Kotler concludes that the science of the brain explains how surfing brought him came back from the trauma and dregs of disease, and he reasons that if it's the brain that's doing all the believing, maybe the brain itself is worth believing in.

There's nothing to actually prove here, except to himself, but he ends with an understanding: surfing helped him reinvent meaning in his life:

Catching a wave, especially in big surf, feels a bit like falling off a skyscraper. The speed itself is enough to produce an adrenaline rush, but the size of the rush is proportional to our perception of danger. Since catching a wave is also a time when the ferocity of the ocean is closest, vulnerability is at its highest and the worst wipeouts consistently occur, that perception is ratcheted upward. Add the solo nature of the sport, the lack of protective gear and the sense of strangeness that comes with trading dry land for the foreignness of water, and you begin to understand the potential for serious neurochemical reaction.

Catch a wave and your brain is sitting on top of the neurochemical world.

Can a skiing brain do the same thing as a surfing brain? Substitute "big mountain" for "big surf"; substitute "steep chute" for "wave." Substitute "the ferocity of a three-pronged winter front" for "the ferocity of the ocean." Substitute "the foreignness of bottomless powder" for "the foreignness of water." (Snow is frozen water.)

If it's possible on a wave, the potential for serious neurochemical reaction and serious transcendental experience must be possible on a mountain top.

Kotler, in fact, agrees. In a conversation, he told me skiers may have an even easier time achieving the glide, because we don't have to wait around for the perfect wave, ski runs are ten times as long a typical surf ride, and skiers log run after run after run.

Of course, this is all easily believable if skiing has ever saved you - by resurrecting meaning, by making sense of a crazy world, or by infusing your days with confident bliss. If your brain has to believe something, and it's forced to . . ..Why not skiing?

We can believe Kotler for another reason. Before he wrote a cult-classic surf book, he was a skier.

Wayne Sheldrake is the author of Instant Karma: the Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum.