Travels By Michael Crichton:

Follow-up questions for you to think about...

1. Define Direct Experience. How does it differ from indirect experiences?
2. What does Michael Crichton mean "the natural world, the traditional source
of self-awareness is increasingly absent?" Explain.
3. Do you agree with Crichton's beliefs with regard to the effect of the media
on our direct experiences? Why or why not? Explain.
4. What did he learn about snakes and gophers? Explain
5. In what way did the shift his perceptions? Explain.
6. According to Crichton, what is "one of the most difficult features of direct
experiences"? Explain why he means.
7. How did he apply this to the Claridge Hotel in London? What did he find?
8. What is a conceptual straitjacket? How can you avoid it? Explain

Pages 346-352

But, as I looked at my lists, I decided they were beside the point. I hadn't
traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And
the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or
disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.
When I look back on my travels, I see an almost obsessive desire for
experiences that would increase my self-awareness. I needed new experiences to keep shaking myself up. I don't know why this should be true
for me.
In one sense, I suppose the search for new experiences represents an
appetite. It's an acquired taste, in my case acquired early. From my parents
I learned to perceive new experiences as fun and invigorating, and not as
frightening. So this is learned behavior.
In another sense, I see my travels as a strategy for solving problems
in my life. Whenever things got bad, whenever my life really wasn't
working, I'd get on a plane and go far away. Not to escape my problems
so much as to get perspective on them. I found that this strategy worked.
I returned to my life with a new sense of balance. I was able to get to the
point, to stop spinning my wheels, to know what I wanted to do and how
to go about doing it. I was focused and effective.
In every instance, it was because I had gone away and found out
something about myself. Something I needed to know.
My own sense is that the acquisition of self-knowledge has been made
more difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live
in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the
creations of human beings. The natural world, the traditional source of
self-awareness, is increasingly absent.

Furthermore, within the last century we have come to live increas ingly in a compelling world defined by electronic media. These media
have evolved a pace that is utterly alien to our true natures. It is bewildering
to live in a world of ten-second spots, each one urging us to buy
something, to do something, or to think something. Human beings in the
past were not so assaulted.
And I think that this constant assault has made us pliable in a cer tain
unhealthy way. Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own
feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready toadopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.
In 1972, I bought a house in the hills of Los Angeles. I moved into my
house and was ecstatically happy for several months.
One day I mentioned to a friend that I'd bought a house in the hills. He
said, "1 guess the snakes don't worry you."
"What snakes?" I said.
"Rattlesnakes. The hills are full of rattlesnakes."
"Come on," I said. "Stop kidding around."
"I'm serious. Haven't you seen any?"
"No, of course not."
"Well, they're there. You have any land around your house?"
"Yes, almost an acre. On the side of a hill."
"Then you've definitely got them. Just wait. The rattlers come out when
it gets dry, September-October. Just wait."
1 went back to my wonderful house in a state of profound depression. I
didn't have any fun at all; I just looked for snakes. I worried that snakes
were sneaking into my bedroom, so I locked all the doors every night to
keep the snakes out. I thought snakes might come to the swimming pool to
drink the water, so I avoided the swimming pool, particularly in the heat of
the day, because the snakes were probably sunning on my deck. I never
walked around my property, because I was sure there were snakes in the
bushes. I walked only on the little path from the garage to the house, and I
peered around every corner before I turned it. But, increasingly, I didn't like
to be outside at all. I became a prisoner in my own house. I had altered my
entire behavior and my emotional state purely on the basis of something I had
been told. I still hadn't seen any snakes. But I was now afraid.
Finally,'one day, I saw my gardener tramping fearlessly around the

brush at the edge of the property. I asked him about snakes. ^Are there
any rattlers here?"
"Oh sure," he said. "Especially September-October."
"Aren't you worried?"
"Well," he said, "I've been working here for five years, and in that time I've
only seen one rattlesnake. So I'm not too worried, no." "What'd you do when
you saw the rattlesnake?" "Killed it."

"How?"

"I went and got a shovel, came back, and killed it. It was just a
rattlesnake."
"That's the only one you saw?"
"That's right."
"One snake in six years?"
"That's right."
I went and got my towel, and sat by the pool for the rest of the day. 1
was perfectly comfortable. One snake every six years was something to be
aware of, but you didn't have to man the watchtowers every minute
of your life.
So, still without ever having seen a snake, 1 had shifted to another
perspective, and I had changed my behavior and my emotions again. Now I
was a little more cautious than before, but I was relaxed.
As he was leaving, the gardener said, "You can be sure you don't have many
snakes on your property." "How do you know?" "Because you've got so
many gophers."
I had been trying for weeks to get rid of the gophers that lived in my
lawn. Gophers were something new to me; they weren't found back east.
Gophers were small, cute-looking rodents that created an elaborate network of underground burrows all around your property, thus turning
previously solid earth into something resembling a sponge. Sometimes I'd
walk out onto my lawn and fall through to my ankles. I had an image of
my entire house one day sinking into the ground because the gophers had
finally burrowed one tunnel too many. So I set poison, and I set traps, and I
took potshots at them with an air pistol. All to no effect whatever. Each
morning fresh gopher burrows crisscrossed my lawn. It was extremely
frustrating. My house was Gopher National Park.
Now I realized that, if a few more of my friends the rattlesnakes took up
residence around the house, this frustrating gopher problem would be
solved. I began to wish for more rattlesnakes. Was there anything I could

do to attract rattlesnakes to my house? Put out some favorite rattlesnake

food, or perhaps dishes of water? What was wrong with my property,
anyway, that the snakes would abandon it and leave me at the mercy of
the gophers?
So I had still another perspective. Now I was feeling the lack of snakes,
wishing for more. I had gone through all these changesand I still had
never actually seen a snake. I couldn't really say that I had experienced
successive episodes of calmness, panic, and longing because I'd had some
life experience that made me that way. I'd acquired some new information, but nothing really had happened to me.
I felt different only because I had shifted perspectives. Each shift in
perspective was accompanied by a total change in my attitudes, my physiology, my behavior, my emotions. I was immediately and wholly modified
by each new perspective that 1 adopted.
But never as a result of direct experience. Never as a result of something that had actually happened to me.
x
' Unaccustomed to direct experience, we can come to fear it. We don't
want to read a book or see a museum show until we've read the reviews
so that we know what to think. We lose the confidence to perceive for
ourselves. We want to know the meaning of an experience before we
have it.
We become frightened of direct experience, and we will go to elaborate lengths to avoid it.
I found 1 liked to travel,' because it got me out of my routines and my
familiar patterns. The more traveling I did, the more organized I became. I
kept adding things I liked to have with me on my trips. Naturally I took
books to read. Then I'd take my Walkman and the tapes I liked to listen
to. Pretty soon I'd also take notebooks and colored pens for drawing.
Then a portable computer for writing. Then magazines for the airplane
trip. And a sweater in case it got cold on the airplane. And hand cream
for dry skin.
Before long traveling became a lot less fun, because now I was staggering
onto airplanes, loaded down with all this stuff that I felt I had to take with
me. I had made a new routine instead of escaping the old one. I wasn't
getting away from the office any more: I was just carrying most of the
contents of my desk on my shoulders.
So one day I decided I would get on the plane and carry nothing at
all. Nothing to entertain me, nothing to save me from boredom. I stepped

on the plane in a state of panicnone of my familiar stuff! What was I

going to do?
It turned out I had a fine time. I read the magazines that were on the
plane. I talked to people. I stared out the window. I thought about things.
It turned out I didn't need any of that stuff I thought I needed. In fact, I felt
a lot more alive without it.
One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by
any theories and expectations. It's hard to observe without imposing a
theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as
Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be
observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. .And often
those expectations get in the way.
Claridgc's Hotel in London is famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its
guests. If you like mineral water at your bedside every night, the staff of
Claridge's will notice this, and each night you'll find the bottle of mineral
water by your bed. If you like it half empty, you will find it half empty. And
since the staff is English, no eccentricity is too bizarre to
indulge.
I lived at Claridge's for several weeks in 1978, rewriting a screenplay. I was
typing and cutting and pasting the pages together. But I couldn't get an
ordinary tape dispenser; I just had a plain roll of Scotch tape and a pair of
scissors. Of course, every time I cut a piece of tape, the edge would fall back
onto the roll, and I'd have a terrible time prying it free with my fingernails to
cut another piece. Eventually I hit on the expedient of cutting long strips of
tape, and running them lightly down the knobs of my desk drawers on both
sides of the desk. This allowed me simply to cut between the knobs to get a
piece of tape. I followed this procedure . of taping the drawers for several
weeks.
A year later I returned to Claridge's and checked into a room. It was a
nice room, but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch
tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner.
They'd remembered! I was flattered, but I tried to imagine what the staff
must have thought. Who knows why this guy likes it? But he always tapes the
desk drawers shut. So make sure they're taped shut on arrival, so Mr.
Crichton will be comfortable.
That's the difficulty with making theories. The original observation wasn't
wrongbut the conclusion drawn was wrong. It takes an enormous effort
to avoid all theories and just seejust

experience directly. But, for a time, subjective experience might benefit

from a little freedom before we try to slap it into a conceptual straitjacket.
Sometimes it's better just to sit and watch.
It's surprising what you can learn that way.
I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by
anyone who wishes to try.
I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging
the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I
believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough.
And I believe exactly the same thing is true of inner travel. You don't
have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can
find out about them yourself if you want to. Don't take my word for it.
Be as skeptical as you like.
Find out for yourself.
I have many friends from scientific backgrounds who accept me with
amused toleration. They like me despite my views. But I have learned not to
debate with them any more. Unless you are willing to experience these
things yourself, even so mundane a phenomenon as meditation sounds
fanciful and absurd. From my point of view, these scientists are exactly
like the New Guinea tribesmen who refuse to believe the metal birds in the
sky contain people. How can you argue with them? Unless they're willing
to go to the airport and see for themselves, no discussion is really possible.
And, of course, if they do go to the airport, no discussion is necessary.
So, in the end, find out for yourself.
Ive come to take a rather simple-minded view of all this. Theres a natural
human resistance to change. We all fall into patterns and habits that
eventually constrict our lives, but which we have difficulty breaking anyway.
Rilke described the problem in this simple way:
Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of
your bouse, which you know so well. Enormous
space is near. . . .