THE VERGE EXTREME

CALIFORNIA’S RELIGION OF TRANSFORMATION

Adapted from The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle Books, 2006).

BETWEEN ITS EDENIC BOUNTY and multicultural mix, its wayward freedoms and hungry dreams, California remains an imaginative frontier exceptional in the history of American religion. Less a place of origins than of mutations, California long ago became a laboratory of the spirit, a sacred playground at the far margins of the West. Here, deities and practices from across space and time have been mixed and matched, refracted and refined, packaged and consumed anew. Such spiritual eclecticism is not novel, of course. But nowhere else in the modern world has such unruly creativity come as close to becoming the status quo. I call this spiritual ethos “California consciousness”: an imaginative, experimental, and often hedonistic quest for human transformation by any means necessary.

Defining California's religion of transformation is no easier than defining the New Age. Though world faiths like Buddhism and Christianity have marked the West Coast's alternative spirituality in fundamental ways, many of the paths that cross California are, in the words of the religious scholar Robert Fuller, “spiritual, but not religious.” Even that wan word spirituality barely works, since many paths crisscross the realms of sacred and profane, and look more like exercise routines or art or crazy fun than sacred pursuits. But that is the point, since the quest for insight, experience, and personal growth can take you anywhere: a mountaintop, a computer, a yoga mat, a rock ‘n’ roll hall.

I call this spiritual ethos “California consciousness”: an imaginative, experimental, and often hedonistic quest for human transformation by any means necessary.

In their quest for transformation, California seekers could be said to have taken the bait that William James dangled in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. For James, personal experience was the cornerstone of the religious life, rather than dogma or institution or even belief. Because of his interest in individual experience, James accepted mysticism and “altered states” as valid points of departure. Experimenting with psychedelic compounds like peyote and nitrous oxide, James argued that such exalted states of consciousness had to be integrated into any philosophy worth its salt. Though James’ approach hardly exhausts our understanding of religion, it certainly helps illuminate California consciousness, which insists that personal experience—and the psycho-spiritual practices that transform and shape that experience—are doorways into a deeper change.

According to the historian Robert Hine, California wound up hosting the largest number of utopian experiments in the nation during its first century as a state.

One early exemplar of California consciousness is John Muir, the most articulate and prophetic poet of California's remarkable natural landscape. Fusing Emerson's joyful Transcendentalist hymns with a naturalist's gift for crisp detail, Muir's writings galvanized America's love of the outdoors. Horrified by the exploitation of the places he worshiped, Muir eventually used his public profile to achieve concrete gains, founding the Sierra Club and battling to preserve Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and redwood groves across Northern California. Muir drank deeply of wildness, and at his most ecstatic, he seemed to melt into the earth like a pagan. In a 1869 letter, Muir wrote:

Now we are fairly into the mountains, and they into us … What bright seething white-fire enthusiasm is bred in us—without our help or knowledge. A perfect influx into every pore and cell of us, fusing, vaporizing by its heat until the boundary walls of our heavy flesh tabernacle seem taken down and we flow and diffuse into the very air and trees and streams and rocks, thrilling with them to the touch of the vital sunbeams.

Trippy stuff, but not as trippy as the remarkable altered state that bloomed in Muir's mind during his attempt to be the first (white) man to climb Mount Ritter in 1872. Clambering up crumbling battlements of metamorphic rock, Muir eventually found himself in an impossible spot: spreadeagled against a smooth cliff face, unable to move hand or foot. Convinced he was about to fall, Muir suddenly became “possessed of a new sense.” His vision became vastly sharper, as if he saw the rock through a microscope, and an external power seemed to take control of his body, moving it up the rock “with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do.”

This is mysticism, not as contemplative exercise, but as extreme sport. In his account, Muir scrambles about for the proper religious or scientific metaphor for this “new sense”—instinct, guardian angel, the other self. Muir had experienced what the Spanish pragmatist philosopher George Santayana described a few decades later in a lecture he gave to UC Berkeley's Philosophical Union. Speaking to the California audience about “your forests and your Sierras,” Santayana noted that “in their non-human beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the super-human possibilities of your own spirit.” Later in the century, people would come to describe these superhuman possibilities with yogic language, or the psychologist Abraham Maslow's notion of a “peak experience.”

ELSEWHERE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY California, humanity's superhuman possibilities were being explored collectively. At the time, utopian colonies were sprouting up across the United States like mushrooms, with some of the most famous, like Oneida and Brook Farm, breaking ground in the Northeast. But California, with its fruitful climate and relatively blank slate, also beckoned those who wanted to build new worlds and new communities. According to the historian Robert Hine, California wound up hosting the largest number of utopian experiments in the nation during its first century as a state.

One of the more ambitious colonies devoted to spiritual transformation opened in 1897, when Katherine Tingley lay the cornerstone for the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity on San Diego's craggy Point Loma. Robed in her trademark purple, Tingley anointed the perfectly square cornerstone with oil and wine as her followers read portions of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Orphic mysteries. These readings made sense, because Tingley had recently become head of a major branch of the Theosophical Society, an organization cofounded in New York in 1875 by Colonel Henry Olcott and a cigar-smoking Russian trickster named Madame Blavatsky. Weaving together occult Neoplatonism, parapsychology, and Eastern lore, Theosophy was perhaps the most influential mystical organization of the nineteenth century, and in many ways created the template for the New Age.

Theosophy introduced thousands of Westerners to Eastern mysticism, which, unlike all but the most esoteric strains of Christianity, teaches practices that supposedly can transform the devoted practitioner into a more-than-human being. At the same time, Blavatsky's writings attempted to connect mysticism with the latest ideas in science, especially Darwin's concept of human evolution. Blavatsky believed that humanity had descended from a series of “root races,” including the Lemurians and the residents of Atlantis, and that humanity was beginning to mutate into a new and superior “sixth race.” In The Secret Doctrine, she argued that this transformation would occur in America. Annie Besant, who controlled another branch of the society headquartered in India, believed it would happen in Southern California; Besant claimed that the finest magnetic vibrations in the world were to be found in Pasadena.

Despite her mystic trappings, Tingley approached the work of human transformation as a social reformer. Tingley liked to cite a passage from Walt Whitman where the poet described an imagined community—“say in some pleasant western settlement or town”—where “in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality developed, exercised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit.” Tingley hoped to achieve this through Raja Yoga, a training program that emphasized music, dance, and self-discipline, and that insisted on maintaining silence through much of the day. The first word that young children learned to spell in the community's schools was attention—the same word that the mynah bird squawks in Aldous Huxley's 1962 novel Island, where the bird serves to remind the inhabitants of Huxley's fictional Utopia to awaken to the moment.

By 1907, Tingley's San Diego community—nicknamed “Lomaland”—had grown to 500 people, and its gardens and Orientalist buildings were a popular draw for tourists and San Diegans alike. But Lomaland's good standing with the locals did not prevent the Los Angeles Times from accusing her of organizing “midnight pilgrimages” that led to “gross immoralities,” although one of the pilgrimages in question consisted of little more than toga-clad Theosophists eating fruit and listening to Tingley discuss the unusual mental powers of Spot, her cocker spaniel. Following Tingley's death in 1929, the community rapidly declined.

As early as 1913, one local writer was already complaining that “No other city in the United States possesses so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population.”

During the 1920s, a more unvarnished source for the mystical East's religion of transformation arrived in California. Paramahansa Yogananda was a charismatic swami from India who packed the halls across America with his accessible lectures about the “science of yoga.” After a successful cross-country tour in 1924, Yogananda decided to settle down in Southern California, where he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship. When asked why he chose Los Angeles, Yogananda replied that he considered the city to be the most spiritual place in the country, the Benares of America—Benares being perhaps the holiest city in India, where pilgrims from across the country come to die. Though Los Angeles lacked the corpse-choked river of this ancient Indian city, the boomtown did have a surfeit of seekers. As early as 1913, one local writer was already complaining that “No other city in the United States possesses so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population.”

Like many Hindu teachers of the time, Yogananda stressed the modernity of the mystic way, proclaiming the global unity of religions, and linking scientific invention with spiritual forces—a crucial element of California consciousness, which would try to blend ancient truths with modern ideas of biological evolution and technological progress. Yogananda taught “scientific techniques” to attain God consciousness, a practical system of energy work he called Kriya Yoga. Yogananda also compared the sound of om to a cosmic motor, and the third eye to a “broadcasting station.” Cinema was, for him, the perfect illustration of the Vedantist claim that the material world was a passing illusion woven from waves of energy. In his book Autobiography of a Yogi, one of the most popular texts of the mystic counterculture to come, Yogananda emphasizes his amazing psychic experiences rather than his philosophical ideas; these cinematic descriptions of “cosmic consciousness” whetted all but the most quotidian of spiritual appetites, helping to reaffirm the central role of personal experience within California consciousness.

In 1909, the fourteen-year-old J. Krishnamurti was discovered in India by Charles Leadbeater, a Theosophical leader and probable pederast who had already gotten in trouble for teaching young boys to masturbate.

Though the body has usually been considered an enemy in religious mysticism, in California the healthy and happy flesh infused the emerging religion of personal transformation. California played a key role, for example, in the popularization and Westernization of hatha yoga, a holistic tantric science of kundalini awakening that today holds sway over millions of Americans. But even before Indira Devi opened America's first hatha yoga studio in Hollywood in the late 1940s, a health nut named Walt Baptiste started offering yoga stretches and pranayama at the Center for Physical Culture he founded in San Francisco in the 1930s. Baptiste had picked up the practices from his uncle, a follower of Yogananda, and they led him to reframe physical fitness as a vehicle of conscious evolution, part of a larger quest to be “infinite in every capacity.” Baptiste was also a hardcore bodybuilder, one of a number of California strongmen, including Jack LaLanne, who revolutionized the American physique in the 1930s and 1940s by utilizing resistance training and by visibly transforming the body into a superman. In 1949, Baptiste won the Mr. America contest; a couple of decades later, he went to Swami Sivananda's yoga university in Rishikesh and was anointed Yogiraj—or “King of Yoga.” Baptiste was a perfect avatar of California consciousness.

CALIFORNIA’S ETHOS OF transformation did not apply just to the body or the mind, but to the very form of spiritual pursuit—a mythos inscribed in the life of one of the state's most famous neo-Hindu avatars. In 1909, the fourteen-year-old J. Krishnamurti was discovered in India by Charles Leadbeater, a Theosophical leader and probable pederast who had already gotten in trouble for teaching young boys to masturbate. Though Krishnamurti was an indifferent student with a somewhat vacant demeanor, the middle-class Brahmin boy was recognized by Leadbeater and Annie Besant as the human vessel for the coming World Teacher—the Theosophical equivalent of the Messiah. Raised like a young raja, Krishnamurti was soon traveling the world with Besant, lecturing as head of the Order of the Star, the vehicle for Maitreya, the future Buddha.

In the early 1920s, Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya bought a small ranch house in Ojai, which they dubbed Arya Vihara. A number of prominent Theosophists had already made their home in the dry, green oasis, which today still hosts a prep school founded by Annie Besant. While in Ojai in the summer of 1922, Krishnamurti underwent an extraordinary series of convulsive pains and astral journeys that culminated in an overwhelming experience of “God-intoxication” beneath a pepper tree. After this psycho-spiritual crisis—whose considerable physical pain Krishnamurti could alleviate only by resting his head on the lap of his young female nurse—the Messiah became a different sort of fellow, one who often referred to himself and his body in the third person. Leadbeater believed the young man was physically evolving into an example of the sixth root race. Whatever he was, he was no longer exactly human.

Though continuing to tour as the future World Teacher, Krishnamurti began to question Theosophy, and in 1929, he left the society and publicly dissolved the Order of the Star. He rejected the whole notion of mystical schools, magical grades, and proscribed spiritual practices—even the very notion of the guru. Instead, he proclaimed that the spiritual search cannot be organized, that “truth is a pathless land.” By the time he died in 1986, Krishnamurti annually drew thousands of seekers to his spring talks, held outside at Oak Grove in Ojai. Krishnamurti's astringent message of radical freedom and “choiceless awareness” introduced a powerful existential dimension to the spirituality of the modern world and helped inspire the anarchism that lay beneath so much hippie mysticism. (The swami who appears in the 1968 Monkeys’ film Head, for example, preaches pure Krishnamurti.) Though too depersonalized to identify with any one place, Krishnamurti nonetheless expressed a deeply Californian sense of spiritual rootlessness, a rootlessness that embraced endless process rather than specific or traditional goals. “The journey within oneself must be undertaken not for a result, not to solve conflict and sorrow; for the search itself is devotion.”

Instead, he proclaimed that the spiritual search cannot be organized, that “truth is a pathless land.”

A fixture on the fringes of Hollywood, Krishnamurti hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo but also became close friends with Aldous Huxley, in many ways the true father of California consciousness. Huxley moved to Los Angeles from Britain in the late 1930s to escape the war. Once in Hollywood, Huxley wrote screenplays and lived the life of a bohemian brainiac, sharing an open marriage with his wife, who procured lovers for him while frequenting the lesbian “sewing circles” of Hollywood with the certifiably divine Garbo. But in 1942, Huxley and his wife, Maria, grew weary of the Southland's great “Metrollopis” and, in a prophetic move, headed back to the land in search of a simpler and more natural life.

Living near the ruins of a utopian colony called Llano del Rio at the edge of the Mojave Desert, Huxley plunged into the studies that made him a modern mystic devoted to the possibility of radical human transformation. In his earlier novels and essays, Huxley had cast a cold and sometimes jaundiced eye on the foibles and delusions of the human personality. As a social critic, he had concluded that people needed to change on an individual psychological level if civilization was going to avoid the disasters he glimpsed on the horizon: overpopulation, high-tech war, ecological catastrophe, and the sort of narcotized totalitarian propaganda depicted with such lasting power in Brave New World. Inspired by his friend and fellow pacifist Gerald Heard, who moved from England to Hollywood before him, Huxley came to suspect that only mystical experience could give people direct access to states of consciousness capable of eroding their mean and selfish egotism.

In Llano, Huxley embarked on a massive cross-cultural study of the experiential core of world religion. The resulting book, The Perennial Philosophy, argued that the writings of mystics across the world revealed the same ultimate reality—a oneness that transcends the muck of the ordinary personality while affirming the essential “suchness” of things as they are. Huxley's impersonal vision of Being would come to dominate the spirituality of the counterculture. But the most Californian note sounded by The Perennial Philosophy was its pragmatic insistence that knowledge of ultimate reality could come only through spiritual practice, rather than dogmatic belief or rote ritual. Spirituality was a matter of mind-body techniques, individual discovery, and an open-ended experimental embrace of transformation. Inspired perhaps by his friendship with the famous astronomer Edwin Hubble, Huxley compared his “empirical theology” to the technology that undergirds astronomy. While a faint smudge glimpsed with the naked eye might allow us to theorize about extragalactic nebulae, such theories can never tell us as much about the cosmos “as can direct acquaintance by means of a good telescope, camera and spectroscope.” In the 1950s, Huxley would discover the perfect tool of empirical theology: psychedelics.

AT THE SAME TIME that Huxley was briefly exploring the life of a desert ascetic, the brilliant and impish Gerald Heard was building the Trabuco College of Prayer in a remote canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains. A loose-limbed spiritual training center, Trabuco College was designed to allow a crew of evolvers to creatively and collectively explore Eastern and Western mysticism without hewing to any specific tradition. Way ahead of its time, Heard's experiment lasted only a few years, after which Heard passed on the property to the Vedanta Society. But the dream of Trabuco College would be rekindled in the early 1960s by two Stanford graduate students named Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two intellectuals committed to radical psychological development. Murphy had spent sixteen months at Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Pondicherry, India, an experience that left him with a profound love of meditation—which he practiced as much as eight hours a day—but serious reservations about the guru model of spiritual training. Price was a more bohemian character, a denizen of North Beach who practiced Zen and had done time in a US Air Force mental ward undergoing past-life flashbacks and electroshock therapy in equal measure. Together, inspired by Heard's experiment, they decided to recreate Heard's “gymnasia of the mind” around a gorgeous cliffside hot springs in Big Sur. They named their center Esalen.

Esalen participants felt like they were surfing the edge of human evolution, as if a new kind of person was being birthed—or, more properly, rebirthed.

The Esalen Institute spawned and nurtured the human potential movement, an incredibly influential blend of psychological therapies and secularized spiritual practices that transformed the American image of the self into an image of total transformation. Initially, Esalen was heavily influenced by Abraham Maslow, who argued that the psychology of the day erred in its fixation on the broken or neurotic individual. Maslow spoke instead of peak experiences, those godlike flashes of joy, insight, and self-empowerment that seem to spring from some deeper source than the mundane personalities that armor our ordinary days. (Think of Muir's experience on Ritter, or Yogananda's cinematic glimpses of cosmic consciousness.) Maslow's conception of self-actualization was crucial to the idea of human potential, but within a few years, people wanted to do the do rather than talk about it. Soon an enormous number of techniques, new and old, were piled on the Esalen table: Gestalt therapy, meditation, tai chi chuan, psychedelics, Rolphing, primal scream therapy, holotropic breathwork, hatha yoga, biofeedback, Tantra, massage. Esalen participants felt like they were surfing the edge of human evolution, as if a new kind of person was being birthed—or, more properly, rebirthed.

By the end of the 1970s, Esalen's practical therapies and holistic ideas had spread around the world, even as the institute became the butt of jokes and the flashpoint for attacks on the Me Generation. Some of the digs were deserved, as were some of the jokes: At one point in the mid- 1970s, the list of staff members included “the Nine,” a group of disincarnate entities channeled from the star system Sirius. But Esalen's essentially secular engagement with human transformation was, in its way, as revolutionary as anything launched in those epochal days. Esalen's leading thinkers and researchers, especially Murphy and the Aikido master George Leonard, mapped and morphed our understanding of the extraordinary capacities latent within the individual—prescient work given the radical augmentation therapies, neuropharmacological drugs, and technologies that are now transforming our definition of human being. Esalen also explored the social and psychological implications of cybernetics and ecology, developing an integral approach to mind, body and nature that would also help shape the emerging cyberculture. And they did this while largely dodging the authoritarian traps that swallowed up so many other avatars of California consciousness.

The same cannot be said of the Church of Scientology, an organization devoted to propagating a cosmic self-help “technology” invented, and brilliantly promoted, by L. Ron Hubbard. Although some of the most important Scientology centers lie outside California—in Florida and on the high seas—the institution's cultic heart beats in Los Angeles, which cradles the largest concentration of Scientology practitioners and properties in the world. Here the Church wears a Janus face: At once proselytizer and pariah, Scientology is simultaneously the most integrated and most marginalized of Los Angeles’ myriad new religious movements.

In the 1940s, Hubbard dabbled in Thelemic magick with Jack Parsons, a Jet Propulsion Lab scientist and the master of an O.T.O. lodge in Pasadena. This deep brush with the occult informed Hubbard's creation of Dianetics, a do-it-yourself psychotherapy technique that made its sensational appearance in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Scientology, Hubbard's subsequent religious repackaging of the secular Dianetics, offered a Gnostic approach to self-realization in a technology-informed psychobabble that would heavily influence later California self-help groups like est. According to Hubbard, buried deep within our dysfunctional personalities are immortal beings called Thetans. Long ago, according to one account, we Thetans decided to amuse ourselves by constructing the universe of space-time and then injecting ourselves into its material confines. Then we became imprisoned in the game world, falling prey to its delusions and dysfunctional programs, which Dianetics auditing and higher “Operating Thetan” teachings can help overcome. Scientology offered the transformation of the self as a sort of science-fiction programming tech, capable of producing unlimited powers.

One measure of how influential Scientology and other systems of self-programming California consciousness became in the 1970s was their presence at one of the most important research centers in the country: the Stanford Research Institute, a facility in Palo Alto that still performs high-octane research-and-development work for the government and private corporations. Stargate, one of SRI’s most outlandish programs, began in 1972 and focused on remote viewing—the paranormal ability to mentally visualize and describe a distant place or object. Lead researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff both specialized in laser technology but were also fascinated by the hidden powers of the mind. The two convinced the CIA—who knew that the Soviets were pursuing psi studies—to support an in-depth program of applied remote viewing. Puthoff and Targ focused on so-called “gifted individuals” like the New York artist Ingo Swann, whose astral travels to Jupiter were supposedly confirmed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft. But Puthoff was more than an expert in quantum mechanics with a sidelight interest in parapsychology. He was also an advanced Scientologist, an Operating Thetan who had supposedly cleared his mind of the reactive programs that shroud the spiritual superman within. Ingo Swann and many of SRI’s psychic subjects were also Scientologists, and some of SRI’s protocols were, apparently, based on Hubbard's high-level techniques. Like Scientology itself, the Stargate program reframed occult powers for a postwar, mind-ops world.

Puthoff and Targ were not the only SRI researchers tantalized by the more authoritarian wings of California mind science. Douglas Engelbart was the most visionary researcher at SRI, a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose Augmentation Research Center transformed our fundamental metaphors of computerized communication. In a famous 1968 demo at ARC, Engelbart first demonstrated much that our wired world now takes for granted: the mouse, the hyperlink, the graphical user interface, videoconferencing. Engelbart realized that the computer offered us not just a machine to program but also a space to explore—particularly when the computer in question was networked with other machines. Indeed, ARC helped give birth to cyberspace when it and UCLA became the first nodes on the Arpanet, the predecessor of today's Internet.

In the American imagination, California's shores stage both the fulfillment and decline of the West, its final shot at paradise and its precipitous fall into the sea.

Engelbart's remarkable vision was guided by a powerful belief in the cognitive possibilities opened up through the co-evolution of technology and human consciousness. Such interests may also explain all the pot smoked around ARC, not to mention Engelbart's personal devotion to the Erhard Seminars Training, that blustering juggernaut of the human potential movement better known as est. A large-group seminar devoted to the intentional reprogramming of the self, est was cobbled together by Werner Erhard out of bits and pieces of Zen, Scientology, “psychocybernetics,” and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Erhard launched the training at San Francisco's Jack Tar Hotel in late 1971, attracting scores of lost hippies who wanted to straighten out while still “getting it.” The program also presented a practical and potent “technology” of human interaction and self-awareness, one that Engelbart not only embraced on a personal level but also insisted on applying to the collaborative work at ARC—a controversial move that ultimately led to the dissolution of the lab.

Parapsychology and meta-programming trainings like est encourage a quasi-scientific or technical approach to the human mind, including nonordinary states of human consciousness. Today this sort of mindtech, further repackaged into post-est regimes like the Landmark Forum, has woven itself into American business culture, especially in Silicon Valley. But perhaps the most reliable technology of altered states and temporary transformation lay in the chemistry of consciousness—in other words, in psychoactive drugs. Some of the most important psychedelics were first synthesized in Europe, but the ground zero for modern psychedelic culture lay on the West Coast, especially California. Years before Timothy Leary began dosing Harvard grad students, Aldous Huxley had penned The Doors of Perception, and soon Los Angeles-based psychologists and psychiatrists like Oscar Janiger, Betty Eisner, and Sidney Cohen were exploring inner space with movie stars and intellectuals in a therapeutic, spiritually informed context. When Merry Pranksters and mystic hippies started gobbling LSD in far less controlled settings, they drove such therapy underground. But to this day, the rhetoric of psychedelic proponents continues to stress the transformative possibilities of these drugs—that the experiences that they boot up can help us evolve, or at least give us glimpses of our future possible selves.

AS THE EXAMPLE of psychedelic culture shows, California's religion of transformation represents an attempt to retool the secular and even nihilistic course of Western psychology, culture, and technology and put it on a higher track. But there is a darker undertow to this grab bag of transformative tools and techniques. From some perspectives, the most striking thing about California consciousness is not its revolutionary force but its restlessness, an anxious, endless questing that Walt Whitman recognized long ago in his poem “Facing West from California's Shores.” In the poem, Whitman's expansive poetic “I” broadens to encompass humanity itself, which he describes as a single being that moves westward from Asia until finally arriving at the sea:

Facing west from California's shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, toward the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled.

It fundamentally rejects fundamentalism.

Here, the poet—an old child, like so many seekers—finds himself at the end of migrations. But even as he faces home again, sensing California's Pacific Rim connection to Asia and its ancient ways of mystic transformation, Whitman grows anxious. He ends the poem by asking a question that goes to the heart of California consciousness: “But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?”

In the American imagination, California's shores stage both the fulfillment and decline of the West, its final shot at paradise and its precipitous fall into the sea. That is why the California dream encompasses both Arcadian frontier and apocalyptic end zone, Eden and Babylon. As Christopher Isherwood put it, “California is a tragic land—like Palestine, like every promised land.” But the Golden State is also a prophetic land, because it recognized that transformation is the name of the game.

After all, today we are in the midst of one of the most turbulent and disturbing periods of transformation humans have ever known. The biosphere we depend on is passing through a severe and possibly disastrous shuddering, while molecular engineering, brain implants, neuropharmocology, and media technology are already whipping up a posthuman human being. California has had a front seat on these transformations, not just because it is a haunt of harbingers, but because so much of the anxious science fiction we now inhabit was born or nurtured in the Golden State: freeways, fast-food chains, cinema, TV, aerospace, biotechnology, designer drugs, teenage tribes, satellites, personal computers, the Internet. In short, California has been the petri dish of posthumanity.

These transformations in matter and culture challenge our conventional ideas about who and where we are, and they demand a spiritual response. In some ways, the rise of religious fundamentalism, in the United States and abroad, makes sense. In the face of unnerving possibilities, people understandably seek fixed truths and clear definitions, which provide ballast at a time when everything threatens to both collapse and converge. But though California has minted conservative Christian leaders whose blistering attacks on liberal culture can match any in America, the Californian response to the reality of global transformation is to plunge onward and upward. The essential temperament of California consciousness is progressive and evolutionary rather than reactionary. It fundamentally rejects fundamentalism. California's unusual spiritual culture can thus be seen as a prophetic and paradoxical reflection of the crisis of our times, at once harmonizing with it and providing, or at least attempting to provide, visionary alternatives to our considerable blight.