So you have a regular spiritual practice—you go to yoga three times a week, let's say, or you meditate every day. Yet the practice feels less fulfilling than it used to: You've somehow lost touch with the core teachings that define the purpose of your spiritual struggles. This is no doubt one of the reasons that svadhyaya, scriptural study, is one of yoga's main ethical precepts. The natural tendency of the human mind is to forget, and it's necessary to be reminded of where we are and where we're going.

When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.