Steven Kotler
Award-winning Author and Former Clevelander

Kotler is razor-sharp and incisive, full of cocksure swagger and punctuates his fervent sentences with a clear sense of purpose. He offers that his "formative years" in Cleveland helped him decide that religion might well be the "the opiate of the masses" that Karl Marx suggested. Cleveland was also a signpost leading him to become a writer.

If Kotler was a "Spicoli," then postmodern fiction author/mastermind John Barth would most certainly be his “Mr. Hand.” Sporting a BA in English from U Wisconsin Madison, Kotler found tutelage under Barth and before long was emboldenly gunning for Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo in Creative Writing studies at Johns Hopkins University.

So much for "learning about Cuba and having some food," to quote Spicoli himself.

These days, Kotler lives on the West Coast and has written for a diverse roll call of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Wired, Discover and Men’s Journal since 1993. His work has garnered a Rockower Award and a William L. Crawford IAFA Fantasy Award (the latter for his first book, a work of fiction called The Quickest Angle of Flight).

His current book, West of Jesus: surfing, science, and the origins of belief is a non-fiction endeavor that emerged from a life-threatening bout with Lyme Disease... one which got so bad Kotler pondered suicide. The book is stirring up controversy, particularly among Christians and right-wing politicans put off by the concepts Kotler presents in it. To that end, this is a book that's sure to rile in many of the same ways that Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Sam Harris' The End of Faith have.

Read more about those authors here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek

Cool Cleveland recently spoke to Kotler at his California home. We talked about his new book, growing up with eyes open in Cleveland, the placebo effect of God, writing as art or craft, neuroscience, evangelicalism and, well, colonics.

Read on, if you will.

Cool Cleveland: You were raised—or, as your website said, bred—in Cleveland. Talk about your experience growing up here.

Steven Kotler: I moved to Cleveland when I was 5. I went to Orange High School. And the one thing I can tell you is that the suburbs are the suburbs. Most of it was not particularly my interest at all. I loved growing up around Coventry, though. What was great about being there, especially then, was that it was fairly conservative. Before subculture became normal culture, Cleveland was a great Midwestern city with that East Coast bluster and intelligence. It was the best part of growing up there. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, if you were a weirdo in Cleveland, you were in the single greatest melting pot of counterculture I’ve ever seen. That whole scene was an incredible education, if you were open to everything.

Still to this day, I’ve never seen anything rival that kind of diversity. Sitting at the table at the Arabica, you didn’t just get lectured on communism… it was immersion in Trotskyism, Leninism, Stalinism blah, blah, blah. And for a 16-year-old, that was just awesome.

You have written for, and continue to write for, a lot of different national outlets. Given your experiences, is writing strictly a matter of craft for you, or is there still an experience of it as more of an art form and process?

Great question, complicated answer. It’s always an art form. Never anything but. When I was in grad school, I got to study under John Barth. We really got along. I had a lot of great ideas and “writerly” ambitions; he was very good at realizing talent and not putting me in a straightjacket… I was a really cocky then, even more so than I am now. (laughs) A lot of people say it’s hard to be the best if you don’t think you’re the best. Have to be arrogant. I was gunning for Pynchon and DeLillo. Barth said, “You can never have too many arrows in your quiver,” and I operated from that place.

Barth's The Floating Opera was genius.

Yeah. [Working with Barth] was the thing that changed my entire relationship with writing, especially for magazines. West of Jesus would not have been possible if I couldn’t write for Wired or Discover magazine. And before I could tackle cutting edge neuroscience stuff, I had to learn about writing about it in such a way to not bore or lose people.

Totally makes sense. I really enjoyed West of Jesus. The pace of it was perfect, surprisingly not at all weighed down for such huge topics. It felt like one part Surfing the Himalayas, one part The Disappointment Artist and equal parts What the Bleep? and Hero of a Thousand Faces.

Then I did my job.

We live in strange times as it relates to spirituality. Any backlash to West of Jesus?

I have had no backlash from the science community, but the faith community gets a little uncomfortable. The backlash from the book has mostly come from people of faith. As soon as you apply reductive scientific techniques and biological underpinnings, somehow it reduces their faith. Like the idea that faith and science are incompatible… I feel better about the possibilities in anything, and knowing that when someone has an out-of-body or near death experience that there is an explanation. To me, if what you want to do is believe in God, the fact that these things have biological coordinates is important.

The thing is, 20 years ago, scientists would have said you’re out of your mind if you told them you had an out-of-body experience. Now we know it is a product of standard biology and it just makes more sense. Let’s be clear, I use surfing as a jumping off experience, which really is a ridiculous trajectory for the subject, if you think about it. But if you want to believe that every surfer is Spicoli and every spiritualist is [Deepak] Chopra or [Pat] Robertson... if you want to put things in a small box, then this book is not for you. I’m not that kind of person. I want to build bridges between people and ideas.

Need I ask what you think about the radical evangelicalism going on all over the world in the 21st century?

You know, I’ve covered the Christian right and the Jewish right. It’s a topic covered and explored thoroughly in my life. When you talk about belief, you talk about certainty. No place has this played out more than in America. Why do middle class, middle-aged people fly planes into buildings? Anytime you put something into such a small box, it’s arrogant and irresponsible--especially things of a spiritual nature. There’s no possible way we can know all of these things. If you want to tell me that the Bible is the literal word of God, then you should know there are Biblical archeologists who have found some inconsistencies. Either we need an appendage of some clarification, or we need a new holy book, because some of the dates and times simply don’t match.

Lyme Disease itself is a chronic aftershock, so it is never going away. The surprising answer is that the effects are still being mitigated by surfing. Because of the book tour, I have not been surfing as often and, frankly, I don’t feel so great. I still can’t tell you what it is about the surfing that has allowed that healing to take place.

You had to be pretty sick to start contemplating God and spirituality. Was there a point where you felt mortality seriously tugging at you?

At the point when I was going to kill myself. I had the disease for 9 months before anyone really knew what was wrong with me. Doctors usually say you’re making it up. They couldn’t figure it out because [Lyme] is difficult to diagnose, and meanwhile I was just getting worse. At some point, I thought I would not get better.

And yet, in your weakened state, you resumed your old hobby of surfing. Why surfing of all things? What made surfing the thing you decided to return to over, say, skydiving or some of the other outdoor sports?

It was a combination of factors. Timing was everything. When I moved down to Los Angeles, my friend Andrea called me and said to get back in the ocean. Most everyone I knew had stopped surfing at that time. They were all rock climbing.

All of the main medicines were resulting in chronic dysentery, with internal bleeding, which was just as bad as the Lyme disease. I thought, “I can always kill myself tomorrow.” I hadn’t felt good for two years, and despite being at the complete end of my tether, I really didn’t want to go. I thought I might get a whole lot sicker. I didn’t think anything great would happen, but that 7 second ride made me want more. Andrea could have said, “Let’s go bowling.”

Not nearly as meditative, I suspect. When you started seriously searching for that "mysterious place" called spirituality, you ended up in Santa Fe, and tried a lot of different things. What exactly?

Oh, God. I lived in Ashrams, monasteries, tried Zen Buddhism. My girlfriend ran a crystal store, so I was there regularly and tried healing with crystals taped to my third eye. I did astrology, sat in meditation pyramids, did vision quests—

In the end, however, you say that after much exploration, "I never, not once, achieved a mystical anything."

I didn’t have money for colonics. (laughs) I’m glad I didn’t. I tried just about everything else.

I would imagine that your world travels alone have had a lot of impact on how you perceive spirituality.

True. It leads to one of my most powerful feelings on spirituality… we talk about belief in this country and believe that it’s the land of dreams. I spent a bunch of time Indonesia, where $2.30 is the average wage. [Indonesians] spend 25% of their wages on offerings to the gods, which they offer along with cigarettes, orchids and incense. Can you imagine spending 25% of your salary on that? How many people are putting that much into the collection plates passed down the pews every week here? Meanwhile, you have people living their entire lives at starvation level poverty… see? That’s a totally different animal than what we’re used to thinking about here. Culturally, we are not connected to that [behavior].

What are your own personal thoughts on string theory, quantum mechanics and epistemology—all popularized in What the Bleep Do We Know?

(Long pause) I think that all of [those subjects are] incredibly interesting, but really new, and the level of complexity is so great and what we know is really so miniscule. I certainly would love to jump to those conclusions and explore them beyond just a rudimentary level. We shouldn’t shut those ideas out because they seem too contrarian, or “New-Agey,” but it is a little too soon for us to jump to any conclusions. We have enough trouble trying to figure out the 4 dimensions we have on planet Earth.

Historically, whatever it is that we believe is ultimately proven wrong at some point. We once thought the world was flat. Our senses take in a trillion bits of information a second, yet there is almost a trillion percent of what’s in the world that we don’t see. Nothing in this world suggests there’s an objective reality. Sooner or later, that will be applied to spiritual ends.

You also talk about weather control in the book, too. Did you ever worry that, in conjunction with other concepts you breach in the book, some might wonder if you’re cracked up, or start questioning your credibility?

I hope not. I didn’t say I endorse Harp Theory or weather control, or suggest those black helicopters are real. But that section of the book was interesting, because science has shown that people with more dopamine see patterns in things. It’s a part of the neurochemical makeup. That’s what was interesting to me.

You don’t disavow transcendence—your experience clearly finds some spiritual vapor trails to follow—but you never really say there is a God either. Is it just placebo effect... chemicals for God?

A lot of people have asked me the same thing. The flat answer, I do think that’s what it is. I just don’t think people understand that. And placebo's not necessarily a bad thing. It has been seen to be shown at a cure at significant effect for illness and disease. Doctors have found in some instances that a sugar pill works better than the real drug. How do you explain that? The mind is a healer.

People want to believe they don’t have any responsibility for disease and abdicate responsibility, but thought is at the base of every synapse, which is a functional messenger system. RNA is sent into body and tells the DNA to code proteins that actually affect the human immune system. Emotion effects thinking, so healing can be directly related to how we think. We barely know how it works now, but that turns out to be a huge portion of healing and that is worth study.

The term “psychosomatic” is from the late 60s early 70s, when we actually believed that emotional and autoimmune systems of the body were different. Kind of like when the Earth was flat, we know they’re hardwired to each other now. They are the same system. So laughter can cure ailments and positive thinking alleviates diseases, much in the same way that belief in a higher power can help humans. And we’re only just beginning to understand it all.

Steven Kotler will give a lecture to wrap up the "JCC Festival of Jewish Books and Jewish Authors" on Monday, November 20, 7:30PM at the Mandel JCC, 26001 South Woodland, Beachwood. For more information, visit http://www.clevejcc.org.

From Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com (:divend:)