The Vanishing Mr. Feynman (Update)

In the early 1980s, a theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate who had spent his life defending rationalism and scientific rigor lay on a couch at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, staring at a banana for three hours. He had just taken LSD for the first time, guided by three women he called the Three Graces. When asked afterward what had happened, Richard Feynman said, very sincerely: "I don't know. I was just looking at the banana." This was the same man who had helped build the atomic bomb, revolutionized quantum electrodynamics, and later dropped an O-ring into a glass of ice water on live television to prove NASA had killed seven astronauts. But by then, Feynman knew he was dying of cancer. And as his friend Ralph Leighton puts it, "He was equally curious about his own nature of reality."

The Three Graces and the Edge of Consciousness

Feynman's relationship with Esalen began long before the psychedelics. He had been visiting the institute since the 1970s, drawn to what Leighton calls "the edge"—the boundary between land and water, consciousness and unconsciousness, understanding and mystery. "I think he knew that you find out the most interesting things when you're poking around the edges," Leighton says.