Happy 60th birthday, Esalen
I’ve spent the last five days at Esalen, the famous spiritual workshop centre on the coast of Big Sur in northern California. I was invited to take part in a seminar on the ‘superhumanities’ at Esalen’s centre for research.
I’ve been wanting to visit Esalen for years, and it hasn’t disappointed. Just in terms of physical beauty, it is astonishing. It’s perched on cliffs looking out over the Pacific Ocean, with a main building where meals and our seminar took place, and then little huts and cabins where people stay. There’s a swimming pool, a glorious lawn, a flower and herb garden, and a path down to some hot baths overlooking the ocean. The wildlife is amazing — I’ve seen sea otters playing in the sea below, hump-back whales swimming past, hummingbirds and blue-jays.
The hot baths are part of what make Esalen famous. People come here for workshops or seminars, and then get to go and soak in the baths overlooking the ocean. The fact everyone is naked in these hot tubs thaws the ice between participants. Indeed, Esalen played a role in thawing the cold war in the 1980s via what historians have called ‘hot tub diplomacy’.
Esalen has a remarkable history. It was bought by a family called the Murphys in the early 20th century — Dr Murphy wanted to turn it into a spa. But that didn’t take off because of World War Two. Instead it became a hotel popular with Pentecostalists, while the hot tubs were popular with local homosexuals. By 1960, the groundsman was Hunter S. Thompson. One time he tried to clear the homosexuals out of the hot tubs and they beat him up, so he retreated to his cabin and fired his shotgun out of the window.
The Murphys had a family meeting to decide what to do with the place. One of Dr Murphy’s sons, Michael, wanted to turn it into a centre for spiritual development. Michael had been a student at Stanford, who had got turned on to spirituality by his lecturer, Frederic Spiegelberg. Mike went to India to practice in Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondhicherry. He became enthused by Aurobindo’s vision of an evolutionary spirituality in which humans evolve into superhumans.
He came back to California and met a fellow seeker, Dick Price. He and Price had the idea to start up a centre for spiritual evolution. Price had attended a lecture by Aldous Huxley on ‘human potentialities’ and it had deeply inspired him. Maybe the two could establish the centre on the Murphy land at Esalen? Mike’s grandmother was dubious. ‘Give the land to Mike and he’ll give it straight to the Hindus’, she warned. But the incident with Hunter S. Thompson and the hot-tub homosexuals made them realize something had to change. So Mike Murphy was given Esalen to launch his spiritual centre.
Murphy and Price consulted various spiritual elders for their project. Aldous Huxley came here in January 1962, and I think gave Murphy LSD, along with some advice on how to run the centre. ‘You’ll need to get your hands dirty’, he said. They sent out letters to various sages and, much to Murphy’s surprise, the sages agreed to come to Esalen to teach. They launched their first programme, on the ‘human potentialities’ in 1962 — so this is the 60th anniversary of the centre.
A very young Michael Murphy with Aldous Huxley, in 1962
Its roster of teachers reads like a Who’s Who of American spirituality. Alan Watts, Gerald Heard, Ram Dass, Abraham Maslow, Timothy Leary, Stan Grof, Terrence McKenna, Joseph Campbell, Rupert Sheldrake, Gabrielle Roth, Ida Rolf, Fritz Perls, Fritjof Capra…I can’t think of them all, but you get the idea.
So you can imagine what a pleasure and thrill it is to meet Michael Murphy now, and to hear his reminiscences about the last 60 years of Esalen. I met him once before, in 2018 and interviewed him for three hours about Huxley and his friends. He’s maybe the only living person I can talk to who can give me his memories of Huxley, Watts, Maslow and the rest of them.
I’ve had three conversations with him, and each was a pleasure and education. He often says ‘there’s so much to say’ and ‘there’s so many ways this could go’ — as if he is tracing lines of ideas and history in his mind while talking to you. He also says ‘most of history gets lost’, and I think he has this feeling of all the history that has flown through Esalen, most of which will disappear. For example, he is interviewed in a great podcast about Carlos Castaneda, whose story flows through Esalen like so many other figures in post-war western spirituality. You could interview him for a week and probably get a book of anecdotes that have never been in print.
And Murphy is a living repository of wisdom about how to set up and run a spiritual institution that lasts for six decades and more. That is so hard to do. So many spiritual organisations go wrong because of sex, money and power. It’s incredible to me that Esalen has survived 60 years, all the way through the psychedelic madness of the 60s, the cultiness of the 70s, the hyper-capitalism of the 1980s, and the culture wars of the last two decades.
How did it survive so long? I don’t know but one answer must be Murphy and his groundedness. He does not have a tendency either to guru worship or to seeking worship himself. He must have a serious steadiness of character to be able to run what he calls a ‘tavern’ full of egotistical spiritual teachers making power grabs for the place, and not let any of them ‘capture the flag’. It helps, of course, that the land is ultimately his. I don’t think Esalen would have survived as long as it has as an anarcho-syndicalist commune. Which begs the question, what happens when he passes?
He’s 92 now and he seems in as good mental shape now as ever. He said to me, ‘I get impatient. I’m 92, I still have things I need to do.’ Can you imagine? He’s run Esalen for 60 years, shaped our culture in profound ways, and he’s still impatient for the things left to do. One of the Esalen projects he and his wife are most passionate about is the US-Russia programme they’ve been running since the 1970s. They had KGB and CIA agents in the hot tubs together, in the years before the Berlin Wall fell. They paid for Yeltsin’s first trip to the US. Now, they are as distraught as I am about what’s happening in Russia. And Murphy wants to see what he can do to mend relations between Russia and the West, while still defending Ukraine’s sovereignty. He is energizing to talk to.
Our seminar was organized by the Esalen Centre for Research’s director, Jeff Kripal, who is perhaps my favourite living scholar of religious studies. He’s long been fascinated by the superhuman and the supernormal, and that’s what our seminar was about. It gathered some very interesting speakers, particularly on UFOlogy, which is not a subject I know much about. I spoke about ‘spiritual eugenics’ , ie the dangerous tendency in New Age spirituality towards elitism and eugenics. I don’t know how welcome a topic that was! But we had a good discussion about the shadow aspects of the dream of the superhuman. Of course, every culture has a shadow side — including the New Age and the human potential movement. But Esalen has been pretty good at reflecting on that shadow side — in the 1970s, when the New Age was awash with cults, it organized a public seminar on abusive gurus.
I touched on the fact that Esalen is now an inspiration to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who sometimes dream of leaving the US and living in gated spiritual utopias, so they can meditate, take psychedelics, and ride out the climate collapse. That of course would be a terrible bastardisation of the Esalen dream. As Abraham Maslow said here: ‘I really don’t care much about helping a privileged few to lead a happier life on the edge of catastrophe’. Spirituality means nothing without service to others, including the most wretched and in need. You can’t escape from the climate catastrophe — I’ve been enjoying my time here, but aware that my home city, London, is on fire.
Esalen is a place that has transformed countless lives. When I was in Nosara, in Costa Rica, I met Tim Booth, lead singer of James, the British indie group, and he told me how he met his wife at Esalen, and how this place changed his life. Last week, I met a guy who had been a banker, then had a spiritual crisis, then he went to Esalen and it changed his life. Over the decades, people have sometimes had intense spiritual experiences here, then they rush home and change their lives in profound ways (leave their job, tell their wife they want a divorce, what-have-you). The Esalen staff and teachers learned to try and suggest to people to let their spiritual experience settle and integrate a bit before they make big life changes.
Sometimes people come back and tell Murphy how their lives have been changed by this place. He said it’s moments like that which have kept him going as an inn-keeper these last 60 years. He told a story about coming down to the meal room one morning, and there was a guy in the room on his own. Murphy sat down at the table and they talked a bit. The guy asked him if he worked at Esalen, and he said he did. ‘Are you Murphy?’ the guy said. Murphy replied yes. There was a pause. ‘I’ve been coming here every year for ten years’, the guy said. ‘This place has meant a lot to me. Now I’m on my way to my father’s funeral. I want to say thank you.’ The guy walked away. And then Murphy says he felt a hand on his shoulder, just giving it a squeeze. And it was this guy, that was his way of silently communicating thank you. He never saw him again, or knew who he was. But it stayed with him.