In 1962, on a stunning stretch of land bordering the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California, two Stanford graduates named Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded a small retreat and workshop center called The Esalen Institute, otherwise known simply as Esalen. Their goal was to create a space where people could explore and practice what Aldous Huxley called "human potentialities" -- or various holistic approaches to wellness and personal transformation that involved the body, mind, and spirit.
Back then, when the Beat Generation of the 50s was ceding to the halcyon hippie heydays of the 60s, the word "holistic" -- never mind the concept of a mind/body connection -- had barely entered the mainstream American vernacular. Neither had a myriad of practices and concepts: East-meets-West, meditation, yoga, life coaching, encounter groups, personal and spiritual development as a form of life-long learning, gestalt therapy, and other forms of humanistic psychology.
"There was something called therapy back then," says Esalen president Gordon Wheeler, "and it was for sick people. Basically, back then you got out of college and you'd be done. You'd worry about your pension plan. I was a kid in the 50s and my brother-in-law was already five years out of school with two little babies and a mortgage. He wanted to go back to grad school to get a PhD in chemistry, but my father thought that was the end of the world. He said, 'Ted, your choices in life have been made. You have to think about retirement and security. You're 27 years old!' I was a kid listening to this. I can't watch "Mad Men" without an anxiety attack because that was the world I saw looming ahead of me. But instead, Esalen happened."
Esalen happened -- and with it, the birth of the human potential movement. In a few short years, Esalen became its cornerstone and a mecca where ordinary individuals and soul-seekers could participate in workshops taught by extraordinary thinkers who were, in one way or the other, gatekeepers of social and personal transformation. The idea was radical for its time.
Said Wheeler: "It was wild back then to think that you could open this crazy place at the end of a Godforsaken road by the edge of the Pacific and bring really remarkable people to speak; that you could invite people to come and learn from them for the weekend; that there'd be no degrees given, no credits gained, no points accrued or anything. Who would ever come? What kind of business model is that? The market niche didn't exist. Now, of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of these types of the centers in this country alone. But Esalen was the first."
If their business and education model pushed the envelope on the status quo back then, so, too, did the people who taught there. The list of lecturers who participated at Esalen in its early days reads like a Who's Who of avant-garde thinkers, artists, psychologists, and philosophers. It includes Erik Erikson, Ken Kesey, Alan Watts, John Lilly, Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, Linus Pauling, Fritz Perl, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly and Carl Rogers. They were joined by musicians George Harrison, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash & Young and other kindred souls.
A quintessential product of boomer youth culture, Esalen was a Happening that was always happening, promulgating a California-brewed culture of personal growth and spirituality while the "dawning of the Age of Aquarius" brought the New Age to new heights. It was not, however, without criticism and controversy: Its nude hot springs were not for the faint-at-heart and some of its lecturers, notably LSD researcher Stanislov Grof and Harvard professor Timothy Leary, earned Esalen a reputation as a hippie hotbed of counter-culture experimentation and iconoclasm.
Timothy Leary, in particular, would become emblematic of the era when he uttered the famous line: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Leary qualified his statement in his autobiography "Flashbacks" years later, writing: "'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment....'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you -- externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. ..'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
Esalen's focus on self-actualization was occasionally taken to task for fostering an emphasis on the Self that eventually morphed into the me-generation of the 80s. "The 60s and 70s were particularly marked by the psychological and the somatic movements at Esalen," explained Wheeler. "That had a huge impact on our culture. In the 80s, the boomer generation turned many people away from political action and social engagement and inward toward psychological or spiritual things in a way that was often just all about 'me' and a retreat from the world. People often say, 'Change starts with me,' but it seems to end with them, too. At Esalen, because of its holistic vision, the 80s and the 90s were particularly marked by the founding of citizen diplomacy."
While Esalen has turned its focus on wider global issues and social activism, it still retains its experiential and experimental nature, with hundreds of workshops given every year that fall into a number of categories spanning the arts, somatic practices, psychology (including neuroscience and parapsychology), relationships, sexuality, and personal and professional growth. Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil have been involved with Esalen, as well as other influential contemporary advocates of wellness and social/political change, including Robert Reich, Ken Dychtwald, Marianne Williamson and Dean Ornish, all of whom will participate in a benefit this fall celebrating Esalen's 50th anniversary.
When asked if he is hopeful for the future, Wheeler evoked the moment when Joseph Campbell, a signature Esalen teacher, first saw images of the Earth beamed back from space in the 1960s. "We all just saw this small blue planet alone in space. We saw it whole for the first time. And Joseph Campbell said that it would be the most powerful image of the 20th century. That image will change world consciousness. Because there's our world. We were looking at our home for the first time. Campbell noted that you could see continents; you could see weather patterns, and oceans, but you couldn't not see any political boundaries."
Emphasizing the importance of complex thinking in solving global problems, Wheeler segued to Deepak Chopra's message that all social change and activism means nothing without a change in consciousness. "We're obviously hanging at a cusp," he concluded, "and that cusp is human evolution itself. It's still all about the evolution of consciousness and human potential. But yes, I'm hopeful."
Check out the slideshow below for images of Esalen and lecturers who have taught at the institute.
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Michael Ruse: Human Evolution and the Sterility of Creationism
bad practices." Sorry
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2012/may/10/dissed-utopia/
At the same time, management positions have proliferated and often filled by outsiders with more corporate and less Esalen experience. The former emphasis on direct and open communication on all levels -legacy of the Gestalt and group process traditions- has given way to "corporate-speak" and carefully orchestrated meetings which discourage dissent. Community members fear they will jeopardize their jobs if they freely speak their minds In short, Esalen has become more about and for the paying customers than about and for the working community.
Gordon Wheeler, Esalen's current President says above :"We are obviously hanging at a cusp..." He is talking about human evolution, but me might as well be speaking about the Esalen Institute.
(P.S.: Please read in reverse order if all three parts get through :))
At the same time, management positions have proliferated and often filled by outsiders with more corporate and less Esalen experience. The former emphasis on direct and open communication on all levels -legacy of the Gestalt and group process traditions- has given way to "corporate-speak" and carefully orchestrated meetings which discourage dissent. Community members fear they will jeopardize their jobs if they freely speak their minds In short, Esalen has become more about and for the paying customers than about and for the working community.
In the name of a “organizational restructuration” over the past six years, the current Esalen Board, president and CEO have been persistently steering the Institute away from its once experiential avant-guard edge, towards a corporate run “boutique-spa”.
Perhaps it would be useful to balance this article by interviewing some other voices as well, such as that of David Lustig, for example, former Board member that has recently resigned in protest of several heavy-handed and unwarranted firings of long-term staff, or more, Christine Stewart Price, the widow of Esalen’s co-founder Dick Price, and long-term teacher of Gestalt Practice Awareness, who recently announced that she will no longer schedule future workshops at Esalen. She wrote by email, quote: “I have told the Board that there is a divergence between the current climate and my ongoing interests “. A recent Statement from the members of the Esalen Community, in response to the April 18th actions, (the recent firings) was signed by over 100 staff members.
For many of us, long-term friends and extended Community members, Esalen’s 50th anniversary this October 2012 will be a bitter-sweet one, high-lighted by the painful loss of the once fearless and valiant spirit from which emerged the potentialities and values of human existence, on a breathtaking stretch of land along the coast of Big Sur, giving birth to the Human Potential movement as we knew it.
Maybe the readers should know, that Gordon’s presence at the Institute is very recent, since 2005, and that his impact on the Esalen Community, the heart and soul of the place, the dedicated and selfless folks that insure the smooth running of the operation and service to the seminarians, has been more detrimental , than fruitful or inspirational, to say the least.
The truth is, that Esalen is in a deep social crisis right now, with an unprecedented divide between a top-heavy management made up of "outsiders", folks having little, to no connections with the Esalen culture and values that gave it its worldwide recognition; and an deeply oppressed staff, for the most part caught in a double-bind, abstaining from expressing themselves, fearful of losing their livelihood, their housing, and their extended family all together. (continued next)
Love that area.