The Spirituality Of Surfing: Finding Religion Riding The Waves

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/03/religion-of-surfing_n_5617472.html

The Huffington Post | By Antonia Blumberg

Posted: 08/03/2014 8:44 am EDT Updated: 08/03/2014 8:59 am EDT


Andreas Winter | 500p

The spiritual nature of surfing is something Surfer Magazine editors encounter time and again in letters and stories from aficionados. One editor wrote in an editorial, "Is God A Goofyfoot?":

I could spend literal hours every day reading mail about people who claim surfing as a salvation. So this sparked a debate here in the hallowed halls of surfdom: Could surfing be a bona fide religion? Is surfing a religion?

Surfer and author Steve Kotler took this concept and ran with it in his book, West of Jesus, excerpted on The Inertia. He refers to the "watery communion" many surfers experience among the waves. Kotler writes:

At the far end of this spectrum are the surfers who believe that since the ocean was the place where life began on this planet, the act of riding on a wave allows the surfer to momentarily connect with this living memory. In Jungian terms, surfing gives the surfer access to the collective unconscious of the planet. Perhaps it was for this reason that Timothy Leary called surfing our highest evolutionary activity.

Leary, a famed American psychologist and psychedelics researcher, was reportedly a surfer himself, and coined the term "evolutionary surfer." In an interview with Surfer Magazine in 1978, Leary said that both surfing and evolution dealt with waves, which he called the "fundamental structure of nature."

Surfing is "just the individual dealing with the power of the ocean, which gets into the power of lunar pulls, and of tidal ebbs and flows; and it's no accident that many, perhaps most, surfers have become almost mystics," Leary told Surfer.


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