As first-time visitors, we were given an introduction and told the rules. So there were rules. Great. And they were mostly about respect and peace and not intruding on other people, and about how "clothing-optional" meant you didn't have to be naked if you didn't want to (good) but that you couldn't be upset by people who did want to let it all hang out (fine by me). To find our room we walked past native flower gardens, fountains and spectacular ancient trees into a long, Victorian-style building fronted on all three floors by a simple balcony. I had to admit that it was really a nice place. Very beautiful and no TV, no bar, no phone in your room. Nothing harassing you to spend money -- everything encouraging you to enjoy simplicity. Maybe it was a place where you really could relax and get your stressed-out mind and body back in harmony. The aura of the place certainly seemed to be affecting me. I was a pushover when Jennifer suggested we go check out the pools. And there, when we finally got to see naked people by the dozen, their nudity seemed, suddenly, no big deal. In fact, it immediately struck me as an incredibly Edenic scene: people of all ages and shapes calmly bathing in shaded pools under a deep blue sky and a late summer's afternoon sun. That just about everyone was buck naked was suddenly irrelevant, or rather it now seemed only right. For them to have been clothed would have made it beach-like, more mundane, less serene. There was no scoping. No groping. Within minutes we too had slipped out of our clothes and were in the warm pool, beginning to relax. And within a few more we were plunging our pale bodies into and out of probably the coldest and then the hottest water I've ever experienced. And what was really amazing was that I was actually feeling good about it. It was time for a rapid reassessment of my prejudices. As Jennifer went to confirm the various massage-type treatments she'd booked for herself the next day, I stretched out my extremely white body in the sun and took stock. The first thing that occurred to me was that the peaceful and rather beautiful scene before me was virtually unimaginable in American culture. It isn't just me who's been bred to associate nudity with smut. It is still a criminal offense, for example, to show yourself naked in public in Arkansas. While I'm not sure I'd want to see everyone naked all the time, it now seemed sad to me how ashamed we are of seeing ourselves in our own skins. I was also struck with how grown-up this all was. Nudity has such adolescent associations today. With thighs exposed on billboards, midriffs bared in magazines, oblique side views of unclothed bodies in ads directing us to imagine what has remained just hidden from view, nakedness is sold to us as a tease, as a promise of something rude we can't admit to wanting. But when nothing is hidden, the tease disappears. There's a lot more erotic self-consciousness on a beach where nudity is banned -- with its short pants and brief bikinis -- than at Harbin, where everyone was revealing all. This place was sensual, but it wasn't sexualized. The air of maturity arose also, I think, from what people were here for: to refresh their minds as well as their bodies. Harbin is not a nudist resort. It's not about getting an allover tan. Rather, it offers something that is both more serious and more rewarding. Mandalas hang in the gardens, cut flowers are arranged in votive niches around the pools. There's a meditation lawn, a medicine wheel, a pair of labyrinths to wander through. It's true that there is a sense of New Age pick-and-mix to the place. The assortment of workshops, therapies and meditative studies do seem to reflect a kind of spiritual dilettantism. But there is also no bullying orthodoxy here. And Harbin's choices are generously presented; you have the space to choose your own salvation. Still, I couldn't quite bring myself to sign up for rebirthing, and I thought that on this first visit I'd skip the Watsu. Instead I did my own kind of spiritual thing -- hiking up through Harbin's 1,100 acres of chaparral before returning to sauna and swim, to dip in and out of the hot and cold pools and to drink the crystalline waters. The second day revealed more of Harbin's charms: a repertory cinema that favors the positive and the fantastical over the negative and violent; a "village" of Victorian cottages and tepees where many of the community's workers live for free in return for part-time work at the spa; an area where you can paint a friend or yourself in different colors of mud -- both skin treatment and play. At one point I was reading outside our room and a silent troupe of naked, mud-daubed figures appeared in the garden in front of me. As they improvised a simple dance that managed to be both serious and playful -- and unpretentious, because they didn't know they had an audience -- a thin young woman passed them dressed only in hot pants and carrying a tub of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. A perfect Harbin moment -- nature and nakedness, people feeling the freedom to explore and to risk ridiculousness, coupled with a healthy appetite. What I'd been reading was some of Harbin's history. It turned out that not so long ago Harbin had been exactly what I had feared. Back in the '60s, it was occupied by a rogue Berkeley scientist and his friends and followers. The place, renamed Harbinger, became a kind of summer camp for San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, filling with hundreds of heavily tripping hippies who'd leave only when the food or the drugs ran out or when bills came due. It was a place where, under the guise of mind expansion and alternative thinking, people became mental and sexual exploiters -- or the ones who got exploited. Harbinger was repeatedly raided and finally shut down when the pools -- trashed by the use of soap and shampoo in the mineral baths and by people's unwillingness to clean them -- became a foul, hepatitis-laden sink. The spa foundered for years while proposals for grand, yuppie-friendly developments came and went. Finally, a miracle happened. In the '80s, a philanthropic real estate developer with a yen to achieve more than material wealth bought the land. He repaired and renovated the place, offering many of the resort's former squatters the right to stay in return for work. When the newly renamed Harbin was back on its feet, the owner sold it to a nonprofit foundation, the Heart Consciousness Church, for a dollar. Today the place is run efficiently and with enough commercial acumen to pay for the filtering and maintenance necessary to keep the health authorities happy. But Harbin has also managed to retain a real connection with its hippie past, succeeding -- remarkably -- in keeping much of what was positive about that era while escaping what was bad. Living as I do in the get-rich-quick, technology-worshipping sprawl that is Silicon Valley today, it's easy to forget there ever was a counterculture that offered a trenchant critique of the profit-at-all-costs way of life that the Valley has come to exemplify. As I left my reading to go back to the pools, I was grateful to be reminded of that history, and surprised I'd lost sight of it in my day-to-day immersion in Valley life. I'd arrived as my wife's escort, as a rather cynical observer of the spa scene. Yet with no fanfare, with no hard sell, indeed almost by stealth, this most Californian of creations seemed to have won over my very British suspicion. The mental and physical calm I was now enjoying as I sat quietly and surprisingly un-self-consciously naked again in the spa's warm waters was exactly what Jennifer had come here for. Could it be that I'd needed relaxing and refocusing as much as she did? That would certainly explain how easy it had been that first time -- after days of anxiety -- to join the other naked souls in Harbin's pools. After all, it made sense now: If you need to escape the world of the material, you need to take off your clothes.