THE BIG IDEAS BEHIND THE INSTITUTE AT BIG SUR
Intellectual history of Esalen explores creation of a place where spirituality, not religion, could flourish reviewed by Don Lattin Sunday, April 15, 2007
Intellectual history of Esalen explores creation of a place where spirituality, not religion, could flourish reviewed by Don Lattin Sunday, April 15, 2007
Esalen America and the Religion of No Religion By Jeffrey J. Kripal UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS; 575 PAGES; $30
My assignment was to address the religion writing class at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Professor Ari Goldman, a former religion writer at the New York Times, informed me that the title of my talk would be "Religion, California-Style."
And the first word to pop into my mind was: Esalen.
There were other ways to approach the topic. The largest organized religion in the Golden State, by far, is Roman Catholicism, and the Catholic Church has a long, colorful and sometimes tragic history here, starting with the founding of the California mission system by Father Junipero Serra.
Another approach would be to give the East-meets-West lecture. After all, California is the gateway to the Pacific, and the gate swings both ways. Mystics and missionaries coming to our shores and bringing with them Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and, most recently, Islam have profoundly influenced our spirituality.
Then there's the story of the "nones," perhaps the fastest-growing religion on the West Coast. These are the folks who tell religion pollsters that they adhere to "none of the above." They are not atheists or not necessarily agnostics, either, but are famously into "spirituality, not religion."
Which brings us back to the Esalen Institute, which is a great way to talk about "all of the above" and the subject of an impressive new book by Jeffrey J. Kripal, "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion."
Esalen Institute -- named after the California Indian tribe that once flourished there -- is a retreat and learning center perched on a green shelf on the magnificent Big Sur coast. It is best known -- much to the dismay of its intellectual founders -- for its natural hot springs baths dug into the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It is, by many accounts, the birthplace of the human potential movement, which advocates the raising of spiritual consciousness, human functioning, mystical awareness and interpersonal connection. It has also been identified -- again to the dismay of the Esalen intelligentsia -- as one of the midwives of the New Age movement.
Kripal, chairman of the department of religious studies at Rice University, has not really written a book about what happens most days at Esalen, the place. But he has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute, or more precisely, the inspiration and exploration of Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy.
Murphy's involvement with Esalen, the place, dates to his grandfather's 1910 purchase of 375 acres of magnificent coastal real estate from Tom Slate, the original Big Sur homesteader. Henry Murphy, a prominent Salinas physician, had dreams of building a European-style health spa around what was then known as Slate's Hot Springs.
The inspiration for Esalen -- and the subtitle of Kripal's book -- sprung from the comparative-religion class of Stanford Professor Frederic Spiegelberg, whose books include the 1953 work "The Religion of No Religion."
Both Michael Murphy and the late Richard Price, the co-founder of Esalen, were born in 1930, took Spiegelberg's course and graduated from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in psychology in 1952. Yet, surprisingly, the two did not meet until 1960, and the rest, as they say, is history.
"Esalen's religion of no religion has no official alliance with any religious system," Kripal writes. "It can provide, like a kind of American Mystical Constitution, a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish."
It can flourish, but to quote one's of Michael Murphy's laws, no one sect or philosophy must be allowed to "capture the flag."
All sorts of psychologists, spiritualists and hedonists have passed through Esalen over the years -- including writer Aldous Huxley, avant-garde psychologists Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls, mythologist Joseph Campbell, tai chi master Chungliang Huang and an eclectic assortment of psychedelic rangers, massage and body work practitioners, encounter-group leaders and countless weekend seminarians going through some type of midlife crisis.
Michael Murphy, who once thought of becoming an Episcopal priest but was then blown away by a pilgrimage to the Indian ashram of Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali-born, Western-educated yogi, has always been the promoter of the big ideas behind Esalen. And he continues to promote them with a series of five-day invitational seminars organized under his Esalen Center for Theory & Research, which attempts, among other things, to find scientific explanations for all kinds of paranormal phenomena.
Most people, however, don't come to Esalen to think but to feel, to revel in what Kripal rightly describes as Esalen's "metaphysical synthesis of sensuality and spirit."
Kripal's work, a useful update to Walter Truett Anderson's 1983 history, "The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening," may be a bit dense for the casual reader. He's too intent on seeing everything that happens at Esalen through the mystical lenses of tantra -- the ancient Indian yogi practices that purportedly lead spiritual seekers to divine ecstasy.
According to many observers, Esalen floundered for many years after the 1983 death of Price, the partner who always had much more of a real-life, real-time presence at the Big Sur jamboree.
In a few years, Murphy -- the intellectual force behind Esalen and a man who helped define the '60s counterculture -- will enter his 80s.
Is the destiny of Esalen, Kripal asks, to devolve into "just another Big Sur resort, a mere spa?"
"Will it just eventually fade away, like virtually every other new religious movement or countercultural movement, with the inevitable deaths of its founders?"
We'll have to wait and see, as the final chapter in the Book of Esalen has yet to be written. •
Don Lattin, the former religion writer at The Chronicle, is the author of "Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge," which will be published this fall by HarperCollins. This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
And the first word to pop into my mind was: Esalen.
There were other ways to approach the topic. The largest organized religion in the Golden State, by far, is Roman Catholicism, and the Catholic Church has a long, colorful and sometimes tragic history here, starting with the founding of the California mission system by Father Junipero Serra.
Another approach would be to give the East-meets-West lecture. After all, California is the gateway to the Pacific, and the gate swings both ways. Mystics and missionaries coming to our shores and bringing with them Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and, most recently, Islam have profoundly influenced our spirituality.
Then there's the story of the "nones," perhaps the fastest-growing religion on the West Coast. These are the folks who tell religion pollsters that they adhere to "none of the above." They are not atheists or not necessarily agnostics, either, but are famously into "spirituality, not religion."
Which brings us back to the Esalen Institute, which is a great way to talk about "all of the above" and the subject of an impressive new book by Jeffrey J. Kripal, "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion."
Esalen Institute -- named after the California Indian tribe that once flourished there -- is a retreat and learning center perched on a green shelf on the magnificent Big Sur coast. It is best known -- much to the dismay of its intellectual founders -- for its natural hot springs baths dug into the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It is, by many accounts, the birthplace of the human potential movement, which advocates the raising of spiritual consciousness, human functioning, mystical awareness and interpersonal connection. It has also been identified -- again to the dismay of the Esalen intelligentsia -- as one of the midwives of the New Age movement.
Kripal, chairman of the department of religious studies at Rice University, has not really written a book about what happens most days at Esalen, the place. But he has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute, or more precisely, the inspiration and exploration of Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy.
Murphy's involvement with Esalen, the place, dates to his grandfather's 1910 purchase of 375 acres of magnificent coastal real estate from Tom Slate, the original Big Sur homesteader. Henry Murphy, a prominent Salinas physician, had dreams of building a European-style health spa around what was then known as Slate's Hot Springs.
The inspiration for Esalen -- and the subtitle of Kripal's book -- sprung from the comparative-religion class of Stanford Professor Frederic Spiegelberg, whose books include the 1953 work "The Religion of No Religion."
Both Michael Murphy and the late Richard Price, the co-founder of Esalen, were born in 1930, took Spiegelberg's course and graduated from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in psychology in 1952. Yet, surprisingly, the two did not meet until 1960, and the rest, as they say, is history.
"Esalen's religion of no religion has no official alliance with any religious system," Kripal writes. "It can provide, like a kind of American Mystical Constitution, a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish."
It can flourish, but to quote one's of Michael Murphy's laws, no one sect or philosophy must be allowed to "capture the flag."
All sorts of psychologists, spiritualists and hedonists have passed through Esalen over the years -- including writer Aldous Huxley, avant-garde psychologists Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls, mythologist Joseph Campbell, tai chi master Chungliang Huang and an eclectic assortment of psychedelic rangers, massage and body work practitioners, encounter-group leaders and countless weekend seminarians going through some type of midlife crisis.
Michael Murphy, who once thought of becoming an Episcopal priest but was then blown away by a pilgrimage to the Indian ashram of Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali-born, Western-educated yogi, has always been the promoter of the big ideas behind Esalen. And he continues to promote them with a series of five-day invitational seminars organized under his Esalen Center for Theory & Research, which attempts, among other things, to find scientific explanations for all kinds of paranormal phenomena.
Most people, however, don't come to Esalen to think but to feel, to revel in what Kripal rightly describes as Esalen's "metaphysical synthesis of sensuality and spirit."
Kripal's work, a useful update to Walter Truett Anderson's 1983 history, "The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening," may be a bit dense for the casual reader. He's too intent on seeing everything that happens at Esalen through the mystical lenses of tantra -- the ancient Indian yogi practices that purportedly lead spiritual seekers to divine ecstasy.
According to many observers, Esalen floundered for many years after the 1983 death of Price, the partner who always had much more of a real-life, real-time presence at the Big Sur jamboree.
In a few years, Murphy -- the intellectual force behind Esalen and a man who helped define the '60s counterculture -- will enter his 80s.
Is the destiny of Esalen, Kripal asks, to devolve into "just another Big Sur resort, a mere spa?"
"Will it just eventually fade away, like virtually every other new religious movement or countercultural movement, with the inevitable deaths of its founders?"
We'll have to wait and see, as the final chapter in the Book of Esalen has yet to be written. •
Don Lattin, the former religion writer at The Chronicle, is the author of "Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge," which will be published this fall by HarperCollins. This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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