Photo by Michael Rauner Photography
Photo by Michael Rauner Photography
Fifty-three years ago, a charismatic young pre-med student and frat boy mistakenly wandered into a lecture on comparative religion at Stanford. Michael Murphy signed up for the course immediately. His growing fascination with Eastern thought eventually took him to India where he practiced meditation at the Sri Aurobind ashram. An English professor, revolutionary and mystic, Aurobindo stressed the unity of opposites, such as mind and body, or spirit and politics.
Ten years later, at the Aurobindo ashram in San Francisco, Murphy met Dick Price, a refugee from the brutality of a mental hospital, who had also attended Stanford and graduated with honors. While discussing their mutual interests in meditation, spirituality, and psychology, Michael mentioned that his grandmother owned 27 acres of land at the edge of Big Sur, on the California coast.
And so Esalen was born. Four decades later, fertilized by the Beat culture’s passion for Zen, new trends in psychotherapy, art, and mind-body awareness, Esalen Institute emerged as the world’s leading center for what Aldous Huxley, in his novel Island, called “the nonverbal humanities.”
On Sacred Ground
Esalen takes its name from the Native American tribe, the Esselen, that once lived there. Sitting on a former ceremonial ground, the Esalen property was the site of frequent cross-tribal peace gatherings. Esselen cosmology described Big Sur as a “weaving” center for human culture and drew representatives from tribes, near and far. Today, Esalen draws 10,000 people a year from around the world to participate in a wildly diverse menu of workshops. It brought former Russian President Boris Yeltsin to the West, popularized Rolfing and Gestalt, and nurtured books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Esalen created a context for understanding psychedelics, established the healing power of massage, and championed wisdom of the body.
Visitors often mention that the land itself and spectacular coastline setting feels almost sacred. This is not surprising, given the retreat’s lineage of powerful teachers from Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Fritz Perls to Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, and Buckminster Fuller and the singular beauty of Esalen’s environs, a space Native Americans identified as a powerful vortex for change.
But that was zen, this is dao. Where is Esalen now? Since I live so close to the property, I decided to go find out.
Roots and Fruits
Bright with poppies, sunflowers, snapdragons, and edible flowers, the garden adorns a wide perimeter of the kukui grass lawn. A short walk from the lodge, where 600 organic meals are eaten daily, is the very edge of the continent, framed by a geothermally heated swimming pool and a spectacular ocean panorama. I tried to imagine the ‘60s scene here when Jane Fonda worked in the kitchen and Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Joni Mitchell sang beneath these trees. Celebrities are attracted to Esalen as surely as the Monarchs and the rare Smith’s Blue butterflies that have made it their home. Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt are close friends of the Institute. Andrew Weil is a frequent visitor. Even Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once worked here as a caretaker/security guard. In its early history, two stars of the Human Potential Movement battled for dominance over the soul of Esalen. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, promoting intellectual development, faced off with Fritz Perls, pioneer of Gestalt therapy, who advocated for the primacy of the body and feelings. Esalen’s insistence that no one “capture the flag” left their struggle unresolved. Now, each has a meeting room that bears his name.
Always eager to break new ground, Esalen hosted the first “Interracial Encounter Group” in the ‘60s, and during the ‘80s, was often in the spotlight for initiating citizen exchanges with the former Soviet Union. Esalen’s “hot tub diplomacy” substituted for the scant formal state-to-state relations of the time and came to be called “track-two diplomacy.” Hundreds of top Soviet scientists, writers, and diplomats made the trip to Esalen to engage with American peers, and get a taste of California humanism. A guest of Esalen before he became president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin had a major epiphany wandering the aisles of a well-stocked supermarket — shattering forever the Communist Party line that America’s bounty was only an illusion.
With the 90s, came an atmosphere of growing fear about AIDS, so Esalen hosted a series of conferences on “Living Mindfully with HIV.” The sight of Esalen massage teams laying hands on HIV-positive participants sent waves of compassion and transformation throughout its community.
Some of the most influential minds in the area of physics and consciousness were drawn to Esalen like a magnet. In the mid-70s, EST guru Werner Erhard funded an eclectic group of writers and scientists, including Fritjof Capra, Robert Anton Wilson, and Gary Zukav, who formed the Physics Consciousness Research Group. They would gather regularly for almost 10 years to share their work around the application of quantum physics to consciousness, studies of paranormal phenomena, and the implications of Bell’s Theorem.
Altars and Altered States
Another Esalen conversation, conducted with surprising discipline, was about the role psychedelics might play in personal and societal change. Psychonauts such as John Lilly, Timothy Leary, Ram Das, Stanislav Grof, Terence McKenna, and Joan Halifax all taught here and numerous conferences were convened with psychotherapists and neuroscientists on the use of psychedelics as tools for healing and research.
Always on tap at Esalen is another kind of psychedelic experience — the 119-degree geothermal water. Healing, sulfur-rich water empties into several stone tubs sheltered in a Zen temple-like sanctuary. Bathers are treated to views of crashing waves, sea otters, seals, birds, migratory whales, and spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Brother David Steindl-Rast calls the baths “an oasis of healthy acceptance of the body in the midst of a society whose attitude toward the body is puritanical, prurient, or both.”
But it is above the baths that one discovers the real currency of Esalen: massage. A kind of moving meditation, an Esalen massage is a blend of classical Swedish physio-therapeutic technique with its focus on muscles and the circulatory system.
New Road to Recovery
Paradise isn’t immune to tragedy. Esalen’s much-loved co-founder Dick Price was accidentally killed on a hike 20 years ago. In 1998, El Nino storms cut off Big Sur from both the north and south. A landslide nearly obliterated the signature hot springs, and while the Institute sat closed for three months, it sank deeply into debt.
Rebuilding the baths was intricate, expensive, and precarious — one wrong move and the precious geothermal water streaming out of the rock at 40-gallons-a-minute could be lost forever. Stabilizing the hillside took more than a year and required injecting 500 colossal steel rods into the cliff, with interlocking iron mesh across the surface. Five million dollars later, the new baths — a minimalist stone, glass and metal tribute to the healing power of nature — reopened in the same tantalizing location off the rocky cliff just above the breaking waves.
Still, the financial strain forced the application of “business” solutions to “community” problems and increased the ever-present tension between the two faces of Esalen to a fevered pitch. Albeit not by design, Esalen is modeling for the greater progressive community how to run an institution that is accountable to community values and still remain financially viable.
Board president and Gestalt therapist Gordon Wheeler is happy to note that the long-term debt has been decreased by almost half in the last year and the county has unanimously approved Esalen’s new development plan. But what about Esalen’s programmatic development?
Staying on the Cutting-Edge
Programming diva Nancy Lunney Wheeler, at Esalen since 1980, notes that the “cutting edge” is not always popular. Yet despite lower financial returns from programs in brainwave training or Tibetan alchemy, Esalen continues to schedule them because their mission is to bring to the fore valuable ideas and practices that are not yet in the mainstream. Such “edge disciplines” include Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry, Amory Lovins’ Natural Capitalism, Julia Butterfly Hill’s Circle of Life, Alex Grey’s Visionary Art, and Roger Talbot’s Third Wave. But, as Esalen’s executive director Andy Nusbaum says, “if you think something’s on the cutting edge now, chances are it’s not.” Only in hindsight, he adds, can we make out what the real edge was.
Nevertheless, a very visible edge — right here, right now — is the ecological crisis, a panoply of natural systems in decline from our addiction to oil. Esalen has made a commitment to become a living laboratory of ecological design, energy sustainability, and self-sufficiency. “Esalen is going from ‘me’ to ‘we’ with a new focus on our relationship with the greater community, and global ecosystems,” says Nusbaum. “We’re going to get the entire property running on solar and geothermal.”
This greening of Esalen puts into practice a tradition begun in 1971 when Alan Watts urged a psycho-ecological approach to human problems which continued in 1984, when Esalen gave birth to the global eco-psychology movement. No less bold is Esalen’s emphasis on cultural diversity in visual arts, music and dance. Jason Fann, Esalen’s arts director, sees the arts as a force for healing and transformation. Recent international guests have included a Brazilian percussionist, a Huichol artist from Mexico, and Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala.
Less heralded, but no less innovative is the experimental preschool called Gazebo. Its goal is to allow children to maximize the potential of their bodies, intelligence, and imaginations. At Gazebo, founder Janet Lederman wrote, “the child learns self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-discipline in the most basic form.”
Esalen’s furthest edge may be its Center for Theory & Research (CTR), a think-tank that probes “frontier inquiries” and serves as an incubator for future workshop programming. CTR has conducted programs in alternative and holistic health and has compiled a bibliography of scientific research on meditation. It has archived 10,000 cases studies of supernormal human functioning, including acts of telepathy and extraordinary strength. Recently, CTR has explored more sustainable methods of capitalism with leading CEOs, sustainability experts, and activists.
Building on its pioneering initiatives during the Cold War, CTR is organizing new “citizen-diplomat” initiatives with Islamic clerics. The Center has launched an annual conference series addressing the disturbing rise of multi-faith fundamentalism. Leading scholars, religious figures, activists, and sociologists will explore how to deepen religious tolerance in the post-9/11 world. Last month, religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal and Michael Murphy convened the first conference focusing on the striking rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India.
Also afoot are plans to build a library to house some 7,000 hours of audio recordings of seminars, 2,500 hours of video, thousands of photographs, articles, and books, including the personal libraries donated to the Institute by Abraham Maslow and Terence McKenna. This treasury of cultural assets will be available globally through an online library.
Throughout history, people have taken action to change themselves and the imbalances of society only when the need is inescapable and when there was a widely articulated vision of how things might be different. Progress will come, not by sudden fiat, but by crossing many little bridges in consciousness. Esalen is one such bridge, a place that inspires and gives language to new possibilities of what it means to be human. In so doing, Esalen helps us make the great U-turn from an unconscious, growth-oriented culture to a more conscious, sustainable one.
For information on Esalen workshops, visit www.esalen.org
In addition to round-the-clock availability for Esalen guests, the hot springs are open to the general public by reservation only, from 1am to 3am. To make reservations, call (831) 667-3047.
Allan Hunt Badiner lives in Big Sur and is a regular contributor to Common Ground.