Trial and Error

Trial and Error

Firsthand, empirical knowledge is a way of knowing we modern humans have gotten away from. The atomic number of carbon, the height of Mt. Kilimanjaro, how ant colonies work--these are things most of us never figure out ourselves. And fortunately, we don't have to. Yet, on that tricky matter of how to be a human, how to live well, what to do with ourselves, we are left all alone. There's no blueprint, no roadmap. We have to figure it out ourselves. Today on our show, three stories of people doing just that--making mistakes to learn how to live. First, a graduate student comes to a professor with a problem involving men. How does she solve it? Trial and error. Next, a story about a drastic case of trial and error, trepanation, the drilling of a hole in the skull. Last, the story of one man who spent fifteen years trying to believe something he just didn't know if he could believe. Who succeeds? Who fails? And was it worth it?

Transcript for Trial and Error (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

My name is John Krumboltz.

I'm a professor of education and psychology here at Stanford University.

Originally, I wanted to be a doctor.

One day, the family was having breakfast together in our dining room, and we heard a scream from outdoors.

And we all ran outside, and here was Mrs.

Hankins, our next door neighbor, lying on the ground, screaming.

And she had fallen off a stepladder, and here was this jagged white bone sticking out of her leg and blood oozing out all around it.

And I started to get sick to my stomach just looking at that.

And I had to leave immediately, and at that moment, I realized I could not possibly become a doctor.

Because someone might come to me with a broken leg, and what would I do?

Vomit all over them?

No, that would be totally unacceptable, I realized.

And so I cannot become a doctor.

I'll have to do something else.

I don't know what.

I was, for a while, I was interested in becoming a baseball player, see?

And my goal was to play baseball, play first base for the Chicago Cubs.

And then one day, our team played another baseball team where the pitcher on the other team, his name was Lefty Rozak, was 16 years old, and he was about six foot three.

And I was a little shrimpy 12 year old kid.

And so he wound up and he threw the first pitch.

And this pitch, the ball comes straight at my head at about 90 miles an hour.

And so I ducked down into the dirt and I looked up and here is the baseball curving around right over the plate for a called strike.

And I realized at that moment that my career plans needed to change again.

You're listening to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

That voice you just heard belonged to John Krumboltz, a professor in the education department here at Stanford, and we'll hear from him more a bit later in the program.

We're calling this episode Trial and Error.

We've got an hour of stories about people doing things for themselves and seeing what works and what doesn't.

It's an hour all about figuring it out for yourself.

For me personally, this means something, because what I know can be divided into things I learned myself, which would be a very small pile, and things I learned from books, from movies, from other people, from teachers, from my parents.

And it seems like the majority of what I know, like history, who was John Tyler?

I have to take it on faith that there was someone named John Tyler who was president.

I've never seen him.

I've never met him.

I've never met anyone who knew him, but it's in a book and on the history channel.

So I buy it.

And it's all kinds of things like that.

Everything in math that I can't count on my fingers.

Who even knows if a calculator is right?

But there's a lot of value to figuring things out for yourself, because especially when it comes to how to live, what philosophy you hold, then you've got to figure it out for yourself.

You can read books, you can go to the self-help section or the philosophy section, which definitely some overlap there.

But how do you know?

How do you know if Buddhism and renunciation and non-attachment works for you until you've felt it?

How do you know that hedonism doesn't?

How do you, people say all the time that a life of pursuing pleasure and gratification, sex and delicious food is empty in the end, but how do you know?

That's why I'm so interested in these three stories we've got for you today.

Stories about people trying to do things for themselves, which is really hard.

Our first story, Professor John Krumboltz helps out a graduate student, a woman who was kind of stuck, and she needed to try some things before she could get unstuck and get some resolution to her problem with men.

Second story is about a woman who just doesn't feel good, a little bit of depression and a little bit of just wanting more out of life, and she takes a really unusual, weird, maybe even gross step to fix this.

Lots of people said not to do it, but she did it anyway.

Our last story is about someone who wants to believe.

What he wants to believe in is that there's something more to life than what's around us, than what rational people say.

He wants to believe in transcendence, and he tries to believe it for a really long time.

So those are our three stories.

Should you stick around?

I can't answer that for you.

Our first story, What is Wrong with Men?

Professor John Krumboltz, after he realized he couldn't be a baseball player or a doctor, eventually ended up as a teacher and a counselor and a mediator.

And this story is about some counseling he had to give a student one day.

Her problem, and I think it's one we've all had, was that she kept doing the same thing and expecting things to turn out differently.

This story is about how Professor Krumboltz shook her out of that and got her to try something new.

Let me tell you a story.

I was in my office working.

It was on a Tuesday afternoon, and it was about 10 minutes after two, on a Tuesday afternoon.

I had a faculty meeting that I had to get to.

I was preparing for this faculty meeting at 2.30.

Then there was a knock on the door.

So I go to the door and open up, and here's this drop dead gorgeous woman.

She introduced herself as a graduate student at Stanford.

She said, I heard that you were a good counselor, and I want to just ask you one question.

I said, well, listen, we have a counseling service here at Stanford over in the health center.

My job is really not to do the counseling with students at Stanford.

She says, I just want to ask you one question.

I said, well, the other thing that you should know is that at 2.30 I have another meeting I have to get to, so I don't have very much time.

She says, I just want to ask you one question.

Well, okay, come on in.

So she came in, she sat down right in this chair, and I said, look, our time is short.

Why don't you just tell me the question you want to ask me?

So she says, what is wrong with men?

And I said, well, I don't know.

But it sounds to me as if you may have had some difficulty with one of them.

And she said, one of them?

No, all of them.

They are all, all berserk.

They're all crazy.

They're all terrible.

So my question is, what is wrong with men?

And so I said, well, would you be willing to tell me maybe a little story about something that's happened that would explain to me a little bit more about your situation?

She says, well, okay.

She says, you know, about a month ago or so, I met some guy and he seemed like a fairly nice guy and he asked me for my phone number and so I gave it to him.

And then the next Monday, he gave me a telephone call and invited me to go out to dinner with him on Saturday night.

And so I said, well, sure, okay, I'll go out with you.

And so he came and picked me up and took me out to a really elegant restaurant.

We had a wonderful meal and had a great conversation together and he brought me home.

The next Monday, he called me a second time.

Same thing.

Third week, same thing again.

Same picture, you know, telephone call.

Oh, and he would bring me flowers each time.

He brought me a bouquet of flowers three different times, took me out, dined me and he brought me home and then he said to me, now I want to have sex with you.

And I said to him, well, I need to tell you my policy.

My policy is that the first time I have sex with any man will be after I have married him.

And then he became very angry at me and he just yelled at me and said, how dare you treat me like that.

I have wasted $300 on you and I have gotten nothing in return and I am so angry at you.

And he stomped off and he has not called me since.

And so my question to you, Dr.

Krumboltz, is what is wrong with men?

And I said, well, I think I understand why you are upset and I don't know what is wrong with men, but so I have a different question I want to ask you, which is what could you do to prevent this kind of event from happening to you again?

And she says, I don't know what you're talking about.

So I said, well, maybe if I give you an example of what I mean by something you could do.

For example, instead of waiting until after the third date to tell a man your policy, you could, when you are first invited out, say to him, before I tell you whether I will accept or decline your invitation, let me tell you my policy.

Silence from this woman, silence.

And I said, well, okay, now here's another example.

You could say, if you're invited out, you could say, well, I will accept your invitation, but only if you and I agree in advance that we will split the expenses 50-50.

Silence, didn't say a word.

I looked at my watch again, it's 2.29.

I'm thinking, well, one more idea.

You could go talk to some of your girlfriends.

Maybe some of them have had experiences similar to yours and they would know how they handled it and maybe they'd have some good ideas to give you some ideas of what you could do.

Silence, it's 2.30.

I said, listen, I have to run now to another meeting, but here's my card, I gave her my business card and I said, if you'd like to talk about this some more, my email address, my phone number here, let me know and I'll be glad to talk to you again.

She took my card, left without saying a word.

She didn't say goodbye, she didn't say thanks, she didn't say anything.

Well, I thought, my gosh, I have really goofed on this case.

See, and my whole principle in counseling and mediation and everything is you've got to get people taking action, see?

I was trying to get her, instead of trying, I mean, she was trying to lay the blame on men, see?

And I was trying to get her to take action to prevent this from happening.

Well, six months went by, and one day, I got a card in the mail, and it was, she had written a note.

She said, dear Dr.

Krumboltz, I just want to thank you so profoundly for all the help you gave me on that day when I came to see you unexpectedly.

You can't, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate what you did for me.

And then I turned the card over on the back side, and stapled to the back side of her card was an invitation to her wedding.

And I thought, hmm, maybe I didn't do such a bad job after all.

And so my whole practice of counseling is, how do you get people to take action that will enable them?

You may not know whether the action will work or not, see?

And you also have to accept mistakes, see?

So even though it may not work, see?

But okay, if that doesn't work, let's try something else.

So we're always trying something new that might work until we finally find something that does work.

So it's kind of like changing your mind.

It doesn't really happen in your mind.

It happens by doing things in the world.

Yes, by doing things in the world.

And then unexpected things happen as a result of doing things in the world.

And you learn from them.

And new opportunities creep up.

See, I would say to anybody who's listening, go out and try things new.

Try things you haven't done before.

And you say, well, but I might make a mistake.

Yes, you might make a mistake.

But so what?

Forget it.

Enjoy the experience and learn from what you do.

And you might meet some new people on the path and get to know them.

Talk to them.

Find out what they're doing.

The world is a gigantic mystery.

And it's fun to try to solve all the mysteries in this wonderful world we live in.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

Our next story is about a woman who tried something so unusual and so viscerally uncomfortable making that I don't even want to say any more about it.

Our next story is called Hole in the Skull.

When she was 27, Kate took a drastic step to improve her life.

We do some incredible things in the name of feeling better.

We take yoga classes, we meditate, we take more time for ourselves, we spend more time with friends, we stop eating meat, we eat nothing but meat, we stop eating completely, we give ourselves enemas, we read self-help books, we study Eastern philosophy, we see therapists, we take drugs, we pray, hoping to improve our lives, hoping to feel better.

Kate went further though.

She went to Mexico and she got trepanned.

Trepanation is the drilling of a hole in the skull, which is mainly done these days to relieve pressure on the brain in cases of cerebral hemorrhaging.

Elective trepanation has a long history and has enjoyed a bit of a fringe revival in America and Europe since the 60s.

Proponents of the procedure, many of whom have trepanned themselves, claim that it can permanently relieve headaches, depression and anxiety.

Some go further and claim that it improves memory and can lead to higher levels of consciousness.

Those are some high claims.

They sound pretty amazing.

But even if trepanation does everything its proponents say it does, there's no getting around the fact that to get those benefits, you have to drill a hole in your head.

And that's just not something most of us are willing to do.

Well, Kate was willing.

Here's what happened.

I was at a friend's house.

They were playing poker.

And they had an old spin magazine that had an article in it.

The article was less about the actual operation and more about the reasons that people would do it and their perceived effects of it.

They sort of equated it to being a little bit high all the time.

And that appealed to you?

That still appeals to me.

Yeah.

I was instantly fascinated, completely fascinated and a little confused by why other people around me didn't seem as fascinated.

And I was also a little flipped out, frankly, because the idea that there might be this possibility that I'm missing out on and that in some ways seems to go against everything conventional or, you know, that God made us how we are, we're just perfect the way we are, but what if I could do this thing and feel better all the time or feel more peaceful?

I take it you weren't feeling peaceful at the time?

That's true, I have a long history of not feeling peaceful.

So this was, this to me was like this final frontier or something, because what if, you know, what if this were it?

And I was really fascinated but also really overwhelmed.

I felt really pretty petrified by the concept.

I wasn't fascinated by the procedure, I was fascinated by the possibility.

And what scared me is that I was worried that I would have to do it.

So I was taking an anatomy and physiology class and in order to get some extra credit, we had to write a paper.

And basically it had to be a paper that had anything to do with anatomy and physiology.

And I thought, oh, well, I'll write it on this, I'll do some research and I'll write it on trepanation because I'll enjoy that.

And I couldn't remember at that point even when it was called.

So when I did decide to look for it, I had to Google, like, hole in the head.

Basically the idea is that, like, all the membranes around your organs expand and contract on the heartbeat.

And that your dural membrane, the membrane around your brain when you're young expands and contracts in the same way when your cranial sutures are still cartilage.

And that in your early 20s those sutures seal and ossify.

And so that the dural membrane can expand or contract.

So one of the theories is that by putting a hole in the skull, it allows room for the dural membrane to expand on the heartbeat.

And therefore your brain is getting more blood and oxygen.

Do you know what a congenital fontanel is?

Um, no.

Some people have parts of their skull that isn't bone.

It's cartilage.

The top of the head, you know where the bones all grow together.

If that doesn't completely seal, that's like a congenital fontanel.

But what happens is generally it covers over with cartilage.

So it's still covered, but it's not bone.

That's considered to do the same thing as selective surgery.

So the other things that I researched were, like, a lot of doctors, particularly American doctors, saying that it was a bunch of hooey.

But I didn't feel like anybody ever addressed the actual theory behind it.

For the most part, people were just saying, oh, this is a bunch of crap.

And so I was reading all these people saying, no, but never saying why, no.

Just like, no, it's a bunch of craziness.

So as I continued on with my research, and my journey, and I kept finding that people were so opposed to it, I kind of thought, well, people are so terrified by that idea that they can't even, like, allow themselves to fathom it.

That sounds crazy, but...

And so there must be something there.

That's how I think.

So I started asking all my friends.

I sort of was doing the survey, and a very, you know, informal survey, and I would go out and I would say, Oh, have you heard of this?

And what do you think about that?

And, you know, people were like, okay, well, that's crazy.

Or, well, that sounds kind of like a cool idea, but that's crazy.

And so somehow that just fed my feeling of, well, people are terrified of this.

There must be something there.

Oh, and at that point, I was really feeling curious, and I wanted to know if I wanted to do it, what my options were.

It wasn't that I had made up my decision.

I wanted to know that if I could do it, that I had taken all the steps, and I was ready to go.

So it's kind of like working up to it without really committing to it.

And I emailed the guy, Pete Halverson, that's here in the States.

Pete Halverson is the guy that runs this group called ITAG, International Trepanation Advocacy Group.

He had a book that was written by Bart Huges, who's one of the original people to do this in the 60s.

He was also medically trained, and he had written a book called Brain Blood Volume, and was basically talking up this little book about the mechanism, the theory behind it.

So this is this little book, and it's 10 pages or so.

And he said, well, what we're doing is we're having people that are interested engram this book, and engramming is learning something through the process of reading, writing, and speaking repetition.

So what you have to do is hand write this book 10 times.

Just copy it word for word down on a piece of paper.

Yeah.

I think it's a really good idea, by the way, because it's a huge commitment to write a 10-page book 10 times by hand, and you know, you have a lot of time to think about why you think you're doing it and why you want to do it.

So I was about to start school again, and I was on a break, and I was at home in Oregon, and I thought, well, this is going to be my last chance to have any free time.

So while I'm in Oregon, I'm just going to write the book, and I'll just do it 10 times.

And that way, I have it out of the way, just in case, because I'm not going to be able to when school starts again.

So I did.

And then when I got back, I contacted Pete, and I said, oh, by the way, I finished that.

And he said, oh, well, we're arranging our first group of people to go to Mexico and have the surgery in a month.

And you're eligible.

You want to go.

So you were sort of put on the spot, I guess.

Yes.

Well, it's such a bizarre thing.

I mean, the whole thing is bizarre anyway, right?

I mean, objectively, even I know it's bizarre.

And to be doing this thing that is so profoundly subversive in some way and surreal and sort of unreal, too, you know?

It's kind of like it's hard to imagine that kind of idea was even going through my mind.

And for him to then say, well, you're eligible if you want to go after putting all its energy into it and edging towards it, and then to be able to do it in such a way that I wasn't going to have to find a drill and somebody to, you know, help me that I could actually, I was like, yeah, I want to go.

Can you give me an idea of what you were hoping for, what you were expecting?

Well, you know, there was a possibility that something horrible could go wrong, and I could come back a vegetable, or not come back, or, you know, really mess myself up.

But I just didn't feel like that was gonna happen.

It sounds stupid, but on the positive side, well, you know, I guess I was hoping I would be high for the rest of my life, but I'd always been kind of a seeker of, you know, collector of possibilities.

And that was my hope, I guess, that I would, I don't even know that I had a specific hope of how it would be.

I just, I was just fascinated, I guess, with the idea of changing my reality in a positive way permanently.

Were you in any way just attracted to just the idea of doing something that was so?

Bizarre.

Bizarre, yeah.

I think that was really secondary to just not being able, just knowing that I wouldn't be able to live if I, of course I'd be able to live, but I wouldn't be able to rest if I didn't, that was predominant more so than being, setting myself apart as a freak, which is always appealing, but wasn't my main motivation.

It was too risky, I think, for me to look at it as like getting a really bizarre tattoo or some other kind of thing somebody might do to set themselves apart.

It was just, it wouldn't have been enough reason for me to do it.

We took the bus, and we met up with Pete.

The other people that were there were, interestingly, all over the age of 50, all on medication for depression.

There was a couple, and another woman, and myself.

When you saw these people, what reaction did you have about, yeah, I mean, about the procedure, or about what you were doing?

When you're going to Mexico, to have a hole drilled in your head, nothing could surprise you.

I don't know.

I think that's all I can say.

I mean, you just can't gauge anything by normal standards.

The other people were Middle America types, not maybe mainstream.

I don't think they were mainstream, but they weren't progressive thinkers either.

They were actually kind of just awkward.

Yeah, they were all just slightly awkward.

I guess we all got there whenever we got there, and we all went for MRIs.

In Mexico?

Yeah, this very nice plastic surgery clinic with marble, and it was quite lovely actually.

And we went to the hospital, we met the doctor that was going to do the surgery.

We saw the clinic.

This doctor was a normal, like a medical doctor?

He was a plastic surgeon, specialized in hands.

And they had this drill, there's a specific drill that they use for drilling skulls.

They have to drill your skull if they're going to do any kind of brain surgery.

So it's not, the procedure itself isn't that cutting edge.

It was a plastic surgeon with the proper drill.

And then the next day, we got up early and we went to the clinic and I was going to leave the very next day so they decided to do me first, which I hadn't really anticipated.

I wasn't, I hadn't realized I'd signed up for that.

But they give everybody something, they give everybody else something else.

It kind of put them to sleep.

It wasn't an anesthetic but it was some kind of drug that made them sleepy, like a painkiller that made them sleepy.

But for me they didn't do that because I was the first one.

So I guess they just injected my skull with novocaine or whatever they put in there.

And so I was awake and they did the surgery and it sounded like there was a helicopter in my head.

The bone, your skull bone is hard and then squishy and then hard.

And a lot of times when people did themselves they would get through the hard part and then they'd get through the soft part and they'd stop because they think they were done.

But there's another layer.

So this drill basically drills it then bores it out and then automatically stops when it gets through that last layer.

Traditionally, people that have done it to themselves, they say that after you've gone through and as your fluids in your brain adjust, that there's this kind of fluttering noise or a feeling.

It's kind of like a noise that people hear after they've done it.

So they did the surgery and Pete came rushing over to me and he said, do you hear anything?

Do you hear anything?

And I said, no.

And he said, oh yeah, well, we thought maybe you already had a congenital funnel.

I'm like, what?

Are you kidding me?

What did he mean?

So they were saying basically the thought that they suspected because I was just naturally a fruit loop that I already had cartilage for part of my brain.

And therefore, the surgery wouldn't do anything.

So I was kind of disappointed because I was expecting this fluttering and that I know something had happened and I didn't get any of that.

So they bandaged me up and then I took whatever aspirin with sedative that they'd given everybody else and I went to sleep for a couple of hours.

When I woke up, everybody was done and we all went back to the hotel with our giant bandages, which is really pretty funny.

The four of us with our heads wrapped up.

And I took my bandage off, the big bandage, and wrapped myself up in a headband so I didn't look so weird.

And we all went out to lunch and imagined how wonderful our lives would be.

And then the next day, I got on a bus and went home.

So you came back from Mexico, and what, how, I mean, how was it?

How was it?

Well, subtle.

I remember being on the bus back and thinking, oh, this feels kinda nice.

If I stay like this my whole life, well then, you know, something's happened.

But, I mean, that can really be explained by the idea that I had just undergone this very intense and, you know, potentially dangerous experience that I had really sought and wanted.

And I had just completed this, you know, like doing a ropes course.

So, you know, basically I was coming off a natural high anyway.

Who knows if it was because I had actually, there was anything physiological changing or it was just because I had undergone this kind of intense emotional transformation by completing it.

But, you know, for the first couple weeks, of course, I was vigilantly trying to decide if anything had happened and really, to this day, I couldn't tell you.

I really couldn't tell you if it changed me.

But if I had it to do all over again, I would definitely do it.

Because otherwise, I would constantly be wondering, to this day, I would be wondering, I would be scheming, I would be distracted by thinking that maybe I should pursue this.

And what if fate was in my hands?

What if my future was really in my hands in that way?

Pete used to give out my number on occasion to other people who were interested after they'd made it through the first couple of hurdles if they wanted to talk to somebody that had had it done.

And he had done that for me, too.

He had given me the numbers of some people.

And they didn't want to talk to me.

The people who had had it done didn't want to talk to you?

They were like, well, it's something I did.

It was my decision.

I can't tell you if you should do it.

And I didn't feel that way.

I felt okay about them contacting me.

But I also felt like I wasn't giving them what they wanted to hear when they called me.

What do you think they wanted to hear?

I think they wanted to hear that all the claims were accurate.

And if they did this, that their lives would be easy and they would be brilliant and beautiful and rich and popular.

And all their wildest dreams would come true.

But no, you're still you.

And it's very, very subtle.

And if, you know, and I think that I think of all four of us and I've only, I can only speak for the, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I believe that the four of us that did it, that none of us regret it.

But I don't know that it's because of the gains that I've gotten from it that make it so valuable.

Kate, which is not a real name, by the way, was trepanned seven years ago, cost about $1,200 then, it's more now.

She started taking antidepressant medication about two years after the procedure and continues to do so today.

Her new hole is about three inches above her left ear.

That story came to us courtesy of Will Rogers, who is a Stanford graduate.

It was made by his friend, Galen Menzel, who is a farmer out in western North Carolina.

Kate is a practicing therapist.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm your host, Charlie Mintz.

Today's show is called Trial and Error.

It's all about people trying things out for themselves.

Our last story is about someone who's trying to believe that there's something more in life.

And it can be hard to believe that.

As hard as it is for someone like me, who doesn't believe, who considers himself an atheist, as hard as that can be sometimes, sometimes believing, making yourself believe, forcing yourself into these contortions to believe because there might be a payoff if you do.

That can be really hard.

The next story comes to us from our producer Xandra Clark.

It's about her father.

For almost 15 years, my father chanted the Guru Gita every morning.

The Guru Gita is a Sanskrit hymn in praise of the Guru, or spiritual teacher.

He had the whole thing memorized, and it took him 45 minutes to chant it.

Chanting, meditating in silence, lighting candles and incense and honoring the Guru were all part of my father's morning routine, and they formed the core of his spiritual practice.

He thought that if he did this for long enough, and with enough fervor, he would attain enlightenment, heaven on earth.

I was only 2 years old when my father found spirituality.

He was raised in India as a non-religious Hindu, and was interested but never drawn to spirituality or religion until he moved to the States, where he became a professor of economics at Boston University, married an Irish-Polish Catholic from Maryland, and started a family.

In his youth, he had independently read many of the world's great religious texts, like the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran, and the Bible.

But no religion called to him.

Things began to change for my father the day a friend mentioned an ashram he'd visited in upstate New York.

The ashram was a place where devotees of an Indian guru gathered to practice yoga, attend group meditation intensives, and get closer to enlightenment, whatever that was.

My father had heard of gurus and ashrams before, but this ashram appealed to him for a very particular reason.

The guru at this ashram was still living.

She was guiding and teaching people every day through her live talks and presence at the ashram, not through books she had written before she died or scriptures that had been written about her during her life.

My father thought she might hold the key to enlightenment, so he became her disciple.

Right away, the fact that my father had joined an ashram caused problems for my parents.

My mother probably wouldn't have cared too much, but her mother, a practicing Catholic, cared a lot.

She called what my father was doing guru worship.

She thought that his practices were the work of the devil and that he was corrupting my sisters and me.

Despite this, my father stuck with his practice, recognizing that for centuries, mystics have had to resist opposition.

What was some marital turmoil compared to enlightenment, the greatest possible achievement in life?

For my mother, the answer wasn't so obvious.

She respected and loved her mother, who was the only immediate family member she had left.

My grandmother had moved from Maryland to Massachusetts just to help my mother out and babysit my two sisters and me.

And I can imagine my mother felt like she owed her loyalty, even if it meant pushing away my father.

As my mother sided with her mother and my father kept practicing, a small crack between them grew wider and wider until it became a great canyon.

They started fighting about everything.

One of them would suggest something and the other would oppose it automatically.

Soon there would be a shouting match.

I hated the fact that religious beliefs were the root of the problem.

I myself possessed a mishmash of beliefs from church, the ashram, Sunday school and meditation intensives.

I believed in heaven, but I also believed in reincarnation.

I worshiped Jesus, but I also worshiped the guru.

I prayed to one external god, but I also prayed to Krishna, Lakshmi, Ganesh, and the god inside me who unifies all.

By about age 12, I realized I couldn't just believe everything I was told, as much as I wanted to.

I had to choose.

I had to pick which side of the canyon I wanted to stand on.

I guess I chose my father's side.

I think I was attracted to the ancient magic and mysticism of Hinduism.

The chants were in Sanskrit, a beautiful language I didn't understand, but could memorize and repeat like a secret spell.

Catholicism had given me the Ten Commandments.

But I didn't want rules.

I wanted freedom.

My father always gave me freedom to choose whether or not I wanted to come with him to the ashram.

That freedom was much more appealing than the obligation of attending church and Sunday school every week.

And meditation promised complete freedom, the enlightenment my father described.

I had developed a theory that this ultimate freedom, this self-realization, would happen all of a sudden one day, probably during a meditation session, after I had become the best person I possibly could be, so full of love for my fellow men and women that I could work miracles.

And when this moment of self-realization came, I would merge with God.

I would have superhuman powers, like mind reading and healing with just the warmth of my hands, and never getting angry.

I would use these powers only for good, and they would be my secret.

And when I died, I would become a part of the world, a big ball of light would rise out of my body and then fall from the sky like a meteor, sinking into the earth, burying itself deep into the heart of things.

And my mind would still be conscious inside it, listening to the world, and observing what happens on the earth for the rest of time.

At age 14, I told my mother that I wasn't going to get confirmed into the Catholic Church.

I didn't know my father before he was spiritual.

I didn't know him before he thought about God and transcendence and how to achieve the ultimate goal of life.

I didn't know any way he spent his early mornings other than meditating and chanting the Guru Gita.

I knew him as a man who dedicated himself to three things, his spiritual growth, his family, and his work as an economics professor.

The ashram was a huge part of his identity, perhaps the biggest, and part of my desire to visit the ashram was to understand who my father really was.

He seemed set in his ways, poised on the path to enlightenment.

I thought it was a path he'd be on for the rest of his life, a path whose end goal he would eventually reach.

But then, he changed his mind, turned away from that path, became someone different, someone who I didn't understand at all.

Once, when I was about 16, I asked my father if we could take a trip together to the ashram.

We were sitting in the kitchen just after lunch, with the windows open and the warm breeze telling us that summer was close.

Summer meant my sisters and I would have free time, and we could stay at the ashram for a few days or even weeks without worrying about homework.

You want to go to the ashram?

He asked me, looking up from the newspaper with a sad smile on his face.

Yeah, I said, we haven't gone in a long time.

Well, I'll take you if you want to go, he replied, looking down again at the article he'd been reading.

But I haven't really been going lately.

I asked him why he hadn't been going, but he couldn't give an answer that made sense.

He mumbled some response about not liking the recent programs or not feeling as much of a desire to go anymore, and that pretty much ended the conversation.

At home, I watched my father become short-tempered, in a way he hadn't been for years when he was meditating.

He looked frustrated.

He acted tired.

His eyes were full of despair, and we all tiptoed around him in fear of upsetting him.

Worst was that he wouldn't talk about it, no matter how much I asked.

All I knew was that he'd stopped going to the ashram, and eventually he stopped his morning meditation routine, too.

I chalked it up to a midlife crisis, because I couldn't imagine any other reason that he would have changed his mind.

I couldn't believe my father had given up what was so central to his life.

I was sure that one day he would come back around and believe again.

It's been almost five years since my father stopped believing, and he hasn't come back around yet.

These past five years have left me confused and unsure of my own spirituality.

What am I supposed to believe now that my father has turned his back on everything he once believed, everything he taught me?

How can I continue to believe something my father has lost faith in?

Is it my duty to pull him back into the light somehow?

What should I do?

I don't understand how he transformed his belief so radically, how he is now an atheist, since that's what he calls himself.

His atheism goes completely against what I always thought I knew about my father.

Why did he suddenly change his mind?

I decided, finally, to ask him.

One of the first things he told me was something that threw me off my foundations completely.

He'd had doubts all along.

I suppose I never accepted it absolutely 100% because I hadn't yet had any really mind-blowing experience that would tell me, okay, this is definitely it.

I never had that kind of ultimate kind of experience.

And so there was always a little bit of doubt.

Did you ever have any images or ideas of what that feeling might be like?

I suppose in the teachings, you hear about people who attain self-realization who then feel completely one with everything around them.

So I guess I had this image that I would, you know, whereas I would still have a sense of identity, I would kind of transcend the boundaries of my own body and my personality and I would feel one with everything.

And people who I have talked to have said they have felt this.

My father had this same kind of magical image that I had about this self-realization.

And his doubt grew over the 15 years because despite his devoted practice, he never experienced anything like what he imagined he should experience.

And he never met anyone who did, except in small glimpses.

I didn't have any mind-blowing experiences, but I did have some experiences that were interesting and I didn't have explanations for them that suggested to me that maybe there was some truth to what they were teaching.

What kind of experiences?

Can you talk about those a little bit more?

Well, the major experience I had on my first whole weekend-long visit was when I sat in this weekend workshop and the musicians started chanting, even before the official program had started.

Actually, I started crying, and I had this sensation of being home, of finally, finally being home.

Thank But my father began to realize that a lot of these experiences he and his fellow practitioners were having could be psychologically or physiologically explained.

His feeling that he had arrived home at the ashram was just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because he imagined he would feel at home, he did.

Ecstatic moments in meditation could be explained too.

The kind of most major experience that people talk about, that meditation gives them, which is a feeling of ecstasy or rapture, I'm now pretty sure that there's an explanation for that and that is that when you meditate and you really slow down, your breathing becomes extremely shallow and it almost stops.

And once your breathing stops, you'll be starving the brain of oxygen.

And apparently when you starve the brain of oxygen, you enter into a kind of a rapturous state.

My father was looking for scientific explanations for his experiences, not for divine explanations.

Even though meditation had helped him become calmer and more even tempered, he wasn't interested in that.

The reason he had meditated all those years was to achieve enlightenment, not to become a better person.

Once he realized that the mystical experiences in meditation could be scientifically justified, he abandoned the practice of meditation.

I remember thinking that this was the ultimate research project.

I mean, I am an academic.

I enjoy research.

I think that's what, you know, it's good in a way what my life is about.

And yes, I remember thinking this again and again and again in those 15 years, that this was the ultimate research project because it was trying to get to the core of what life was about.

What exactly the answer was, I didn't know.

So I was approaching it as a scientific experiment of okay, Hindu philosophy tells you if you do this practice, you get to this goal of self-realization.

So I was willing to do the practice to see what happened.

Although I had always thought of my father as a fully convinced believer who was happily working his way down the path to enlightenment, I now realize that he was never truly a believer.

During his 15 years of practice, he was constantly trying to reason through his experiences, rather than accepting them as experiences of the divine.

He was waiting to find the right proof, waiting to have the ultimate experience that would banish all doubt from his mind and make him believe.

But no experience like that ever came, so he continued to doubt.

And the doubt grew until finally he was confronted with a piece of evidence too big to ignore.

There's an Indian holiday commonly referred to as Raki Day, when sisters give bracelets, or rakis, to their brothers as a way of asking for their protection.

At the ashram, this holiday was always celebrated by the handing out of bracelets from the guru to thank all the disciples for their service.

I was at the ashram one rakhi day, and the custom always was that the guru would give you a rakhi, and you know, you out of your own feeling would give a donation, but there was no quid pro quo.

And that particular year, they announced that they were not gonna be distributing the rakhis in the program, that there were desks set up outside the hall, and after the program, we could go out, and if we made a donation, we would get a rakhi.

So they had made it into a commercial transaction, and that really ticked me off, because it just made it a commercial transaction.

So that was probably one of the first incidents that really made me start thinking hard about, gee, is there validity to this thing, or is this just another commercial enterprise?

But I let that go.

I didn't, at that point, it's not like I dropped out then.

There was really essentially another similar kind of happening that took place, which is that typically every January 1st, the guru would give a talk and would give a message to all of the people following the path.

And then one year, all of a sudden, it became that the guru was not going to come in a program, but instead, there were going to be DVDs of the message available and you had to pay $100 to come listen to the message on this DVD.

And that, it was back to the rocky day thing, where it's just now become a commercial transaction and they're basically trying to extract the most they can out of the people.

And I remember the first year, I paid the $100 and I did go in and listen to it, and the following year, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

And that second year was when I basically dropped out.

That was it.

After hearing my father talk about his frustration with the ashram's growing interest in making money, I could see why he might have lost his faith in the ashram as an organization.

But other than the fact that he hadn't yet achieved the enlightenment he hoped for, I didn't understand why he had lost faith in all religions and had completely abandoned his belief in God and self-realization in general.

The thing that kind of really finally convinced me that there's no God and there's no quote unquote valid path, it was such an odd thing because I was watching a show on PBS.

It was a show about Mormons.

And they were talking to this woman, they were interviewing this Mormon woman, talking about her beliefs.

And they were talking particularly about this belief that Mormons have that when you die, you are reunited with your family in heaven.

Now, I immediately saw there's a big logical loophole in a big logical problem in this belief, which is are you gonna be reunited as an adult with your children and your spouse?

Or are you gonna be reunited as a child with your parents?

You can't do both.

So to me, it was clear this belief had to be false.

This just doesn't make sense, right?

But she was clearly, truly, 100% sure that this was the truth.

And in that moment, I realized we can convince ourselves to believe anything.

All of this stuff is just nonsense.

It became absolutely clear to me.

And in a funny way, the teachings came to fruition because the teachings always said, when you realize the truth of things, it will be obvious.

There will be just no more doubt in your mind.

And that was the moment at which there was no more doubt in my mind.

My father's belief was always something I could depend on.

It was the rock in my life that kept me attached to God, my spirituality, and the meaning of life.

Now that he has completely rejected his hypothesis, I am uncertain of what to believe.

My roots have been pulled up from the earth that he prepared for me, and I must find a new place to plant them.

I thought that talking with him about his transformation might help me figure out where to replant my roots.

But it hasn't.

I completely understand his reasoning, and he is actually happier now.

He says he feels free to do whatever he wants, because he doesn't have to worry about pleasing anyone, like God or his guru.

But it seems to me that his reasoning, though logical, lacks faith.

I know that, just like the Mormon woman and just like my father for 15 years, I could delude myself into believing something that might be false, just because I want it to be true.

But what if knowing what's true isn't the important thing?

What if the key is to have faith, without knowing for sure what the answer is?

Sometimes I still have that vision of myself as a ball of light, fully conscious, sinking into the earth and becoming one with everything.

It's hard to give up, and I'm not sure I'd ever want to, even if my father no longer thinks it's possible.

I feel good about where I am now.

I don't feel let down.

I don't feel, oh gee, there was supposed to be this, you know, part at the end of the rainbow, and now I realize there isn't.

Right?

That's not how I feel.

I feel like, okay, I've got my answer.

There is no part at the end of the rainbow.

But there is a rainbow.

Xandra Clark is a senior at Stanford and a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Well, that's our show for today.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

The show was produced by me, Charlie Mintz, along with help from Jonah Willingan's Rachel Hamburg and Natasha Ruck.

I want to thank everyone who told their stories today, Professor Krumboltz, Kate and Xandra's father.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, Stanford's Oral Communication Program, Stanford Continuing Studies and the Hume Writing Center.

KZSU would like to thank the law offices of Fenwick and West for their continued underwriting support.

Remember that you can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on Stanford iTunes and on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Tune in next week or soon when we'll hear stories about rejection.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human, I'm Charlie Mintz.

Thanks for listening and try something new.