Sabbatikos

The empty space of the high Mojave desert doesn’t just hold silence…it amplifies it, stretching it into a humming reverberation, as if the land itself is resonating, or so read some such promotional materials that lured us to Landers, California. At the literal end of the road, a white dome rises from the scrubby landscape like a spaceship from a future past. This is the Integratron, an acoustically perfect building built on a geomagnetic vortex, with purpose—to commune with aliens from Venus.

A group of us had booked a private sound bath, for my 50th birthday—the second stop of an epic day and the last great party before the pandemic ended the world as we knew it. We set out from the now-defunct Ruby Montana’s Coral Sands (now the Trixie Motel) in Palm Springs. Our first stop was the Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Museum. And our second was the Integratron.

We were eager to relinquish our ears (and presumably our chakras) to the resonance of this place. The Integratron isn’t just any sound chamber; it was designed to be an acoustically perfect by George Van Tassel, an aviator and ufologist who claimed to have telepathically received its blueprints from extraterrestrials from the planet Venus. The Integratron is a wooden dome, perfectly constructed and tuned to amplify sound waves and, if his theories are to be believed, human energy. Van Tassel intended it as a rejuvenation machine, something that could extend life and expand consciousness. Whether or not you buy into these celestial origins, one thing is undeniable: the acoustics here are incredible.

We arrived in the late afternoon, the molten Mojave sun dipping toward the horizon making shadows long with mystery, and otherworldliness. The air was warm but cooling fast, the desert shifting gears as it prepared for nightfall. Walking toward the dome, we felt a peculiar energy—not exactly a vibration, but a sense of heightened awareness, as if the building itself was welcoming us.

Inside, the Integratron was dim but inviting. The upper chamber, where the sound bath would take place, was all curves and warmth, the wooden structure designed to resonate like the soundboard body of a great instrument. Quartz crystal singing bowls, each tuned to a different frequency aligned with the body’s chakras, sat in a neat semicircle.

Your first experience when you ascend the stairs to the upper chamber is to stand in the very middle of the room, and when you do, it becomes perfectly silent. You can hear the people standing next to you, but they sound muffled, however you can perfectly hear the whispers of people across the room as if there were speaking directly into your mind’s ear. We all gave it a go. It was delightfully spooky.

Then we laid on our mats, gazing up at the oculus in the center of the dome. Our spirit guide began to play, drawing a mallet around the rims of the bowls (example of what it sounded like). The first note rang out, filling the space not with a singular tone, but with waves—layers of sound that felt as though they moved through our bones rather than simply entering our ears.

There’s no other way to put it: the sound bath melted us, like the setting Mojave sun. Each vibration coursed through our bodies, dissolving tension, stirring emotions, unearthing something ancient, inexplicable, possibly alien. Some of us drifted into a dreamlike state, others felt sudden waves of clarity, relaxing loose old thoughts, buried memories, forgotten dreams. Some of us giggled because others of fell asleep and added their snores to the resonance. The mysterious acoustics and the drone of the sound bath making it hard to pinpoint just who among us was responsible for sawing logs…but I swear it wasn’t me.

When the last note faded, in the afterglow of the vortex, the silence felt almost as powerful as the sound itself. We sat in stillness, blinking in the golden post-bath haze. We were quietly told to take our time and leave at our leisure as you came back from what might have been your astral projection. Stepping outside, the desert had deepened into a dwindling twilight glow of silhouetted sage brush, and Joshua trees, the evening sky opening her curtain to reveal the stars and planets we may have just visited (or been visited by).

Maybe Van Tassel and the aliens were onto something. Maybe there is something about this place that tunes the body like an instrument, that pulls us back into balance, back into harmony with the vast, vibrating connection to everything. What I do know is that it was a great way to connect with my friends and have a unique shared experience.

As we stood in the vortex, feeling the cooling high desert air around us, letting the stillness settle while our eyes adjusted, there was a sense of connection—not just to each other, but to our time and our age. There was also a sense of anticipation of our next evening adventure: we were heading to the famous Pappy & Harriet’s for some barbecue dinner and a show.