One afternoon in New York, I found myself on a midtown street corner, licking salt off a slightly-burnt soft pretzel. I gazed about in a deeply wondering daze, transfixed by the LCD nightmare. Time seemed to stop for me just then, as though I were Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, only without the continually-erect blue penis. Suddenly, I knew that everything in Times Square--the breeze-blown fliers for some outlier porn shop, the vaguely contraband luggage stores, the endlessly replicated advertising for TV shows that never had a prayer, even the tourists from Nebraska--was part of a larger cosmic reality whose boundaries we can’t begin to perceive. The power of the universe, I realized, is transcendent, infinite, all-knowing, beautiful beyond measure. I quaked at the awesome kindness of its eternal might.

This, in yoga terms, is called Samadhi, the divine perception of universal consciousness, though the realization may have come to me because I was in the middle of a five-day drug bender. I’d bought some full-melt sativa hash capsules at my neighborhood medical-marijuana dispensary before coming to town, had taken two caps before getting on the plane, and had refried my brain first thing three consecutive mornings. Visions like these were happening regularly now; my synapses had begun to fray around the edges.

I really just needed to lie down for a couple of hours with a wet washcloth over my face. But instead, I’d made plans to meet a friend for an early-evening yoga class at her favorite studio. She was excited to share this experience with me. Doing yoga at this place, she said, had made her life so much better.

“Fuck yeah!” I said. “I love yoga!”

Yoga Dork, by Neal Pollack. Coming May 2010 from Harper Perennial.

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